Jill Abramson: ‘I’m a battle-scarred veteran’

The first woman editor of the New York Times tells why she got the job, how she’ll handle the crucial transition to digital – and why her tattoo is so important to her The executive editor of the New York Times is about as close as it gets in America to royalty, discounting the president and Lady Gaga. Even in this fragmented era of Twitter , Google News and the blogosphere , the newspaper’s chief still has the power to direct the national conversation, to move markets, unseat politicians, sanction wars and create Hollywood movie stars. Yet from the moment I’m ushered into Jill Abramson’s office, it is clear that the characterisation of the typical New York Times editor as a supremely powerful and rather overbearing regal type cannot easily be applied to her. It’s partly that her room has the jumbled air of an antiques shop, cluttered as it is with several bouquets of flowers sent from admirers and friends to congratulate her on her appointment. The walls are cluttered too with several black and white photos, including one of her mother, Dovie, aged 12 standing beside the towering figure of Babe Ruth at the Yankee stadium. More quizzically, there are a couple of cushions on a sofa bearing images of fluffy “Westies” – West Highland terriers like her first dog Buddy. And on a table there’s a copy of her soon-to-be-published book, The Puppy Diaries: Raising a Dog Named Scout, about her current pet, a golden retriever. “I’m a huge dog nut, giant, giant,” she says. It’s not the comment itself that is surprising – though to hear the next editor of the New York Times wax lyrical about her passion for dogs is not exactly what I had expected – so much as the way she says it. Abramson has one of the thickest New York accents you’ll ever hear, a nasal drawl in which the vowels are stretched to breaking point like an elastic band. So “out” becomes “iouuut”, and “now” “niouuuw”, a bit – with all due respect to her beloved dogs – like the mewing of a cat. Abramson , now 57, was born on the Upper West Side to parents who were themselves lifelong Manhattanites. In her childhood home, the New York Times substituted for religion, she says. “What the New York Times said was the absolute truth.” She wears her New Yorker-ness brazenly, proudly, on her sleeve. Or rather, under it – on her right shoulder where eight years ago she placed a tattoo to mark her return to New York city after a long stretch in Washington. It’s a rendition of a New York subway token, an image she chose for its double resonance. “Having grown up here I love the subway, take it everywhere,” she says. “But the reason I picked it for my tattoo was also that on the outside rim of the token it says ‘Good for one fare only’ and that’s my philosophy for life. So it’s a perfect combination of a great philosophy and the city that I love and was born in.” The quality that has been most noted about Abramson’s elevation to the top job in American journalism has not been her identity as a New Yorker but her gender. For the first time in the Times’s 160-year history, the institution is about to be led by a woman. Abramson herself is ambivalent about the significance of that bald fact. In 2006, when Katie Couric was made the first solo anchor of a network news show, she wrote an article in the Times review section headlined “When will we stop saying ‘First woman to . . .’?” She chuckled about that at a dinner last week with Arthur Sulzberger – the Times’s publisher, who gave her the editor’s job. “The thesis of the piece was, when are we going to stop commenting on that. I was saying to Arthur, this is ironic and makes me into a big hypocrite.” But she swiftly adds that in her opinion the “first woman” syndrome does have real meaning. What meaning, I ask. “Number one,” she replies, “I know I didn’t get this job because I’m a woman; I got it because I’m the best qualified person. But nonetheless what it means to me is that the executive editor of the New York Times is such an important position in our society, the Times itself is indispensable to society, and a woman gets to run the newsroom, which is meaningful.” Will it define the paper’s direction under her in any sense? “Possibly,” she replies. “But I think everybody here knows what kind of stories excite me most: hard-edged, deeply reported investigative stories, rich on-the-ground international stories, so I don’t think anyone is fearful that I’m going to bring soft news on to the front page.” Few would disagree with Abramson’s contention that she was best qualified for the post. Harvard-educated, she joined the paper from the Wall Street Journal in 1997 and went on to become Washington bureau chief of the Times. In that role, she survived a tense relationship with the then editor-in- chief, Howell Raines , who was pushed from the job after only two years in a move that Abramson is said to have encouraged and that was widely seen at the time as vindication for her criticism of him. Then there were the many bruising encounters with the Bush administration. “I’m a battle-scarred veteran in that regard. There were several national security stories that they asked us not to publish that we ended up publishing.” Her track record includes stints at investigative reporting, a skill that proved useful during the recent run of WikiLeaks disclosures, in which she played no small part. Of all the investigative work she’s done, though, she is proudest of the inquiry she led into the independent counsel Ken Starr at the time of the impeachment of Bill Clinton . “We had a sceptical take on the motivations of [Starr], and I’m really proud that we did that because every one else was feeding off of tips from the independent counsel.” Her commitment to investigative reporting could prove crucial in the next few years as other papers across the US increasingly abandon serious and probing reporting. Abramson is well versed in the bloodbath that has befallen the American newspaper industry. Last year she wrote an essay for the Daedalus journal, in which she chronicled the catastrophe that has unfolded as foreign bureaux have closed, newsrooms been slashed and entire newspapers shut down. The Times, with its still hefty news- room of 1,200 journalists, has managed largely to buck the trend, but it has not been immune from the existential crisis of steadily falling advertising and circulation revenues as readers migrate to the web. As managing editor of the paper over the past eight years, working alongside the current executive editor, Bill Keller, she has had to wield the knife and cut 100 newsroom jobs, but says: “It’s not been the same kind of deep muscle cuts that other news- rooms have made.” Abramson has spent the past six months immersing herself in the digital side of the Times operation. That’s important preparation, because the paper’s digital future may well determine the success or failure of her term in the editor’s seat. How well, how radically, will she handle the ongoing transition to a digital world? The Times’s record in that regard is patchy. On the one hand, on 6 September Abramson will inherit a paper that is second to none in terms of its global internet reach. Its readership, measured as monthly unique users, now stands at 46 million worldwide, which is testament to its winning combination of superb traditional reporting and an impressive modern array of multi- media offerings and blogs. But the Times has also been criticised for being sluggish when it comes to developing its internet community of readers by embracing the openness and interactivity of the web. “I would say that’s fair,” Abramson concurs. “We are now on that case heavily in terms of using social media for reporting and to make the Times a platform for people to gather. In some ways, on breaking news our greatest competitor can be Twitter.” I’m glad she raises the Twitter issue, because if she didn’t, I would have had to. It goes to the heart of the Times’s challenge: the perception that at its core the paper remains slightly resistant to the digital revolution. That impression hasn’t been helped by the recent series of columns written by Keller himself, in which he rather proudly declared that he had tweeted “#TwitterMakes-YouStupid. Discuss” while in another he ridiculed the Huffington Post for serving up a diet of “celebrity gossip, adorable kitten videos, posts from unpaid bloggers and news reports from other publications”. His comments have a grain of truth in them, certainly, but they played to the Times’s weak spot – the impression that it can radiate a patrician aloofness, of haughty disregard of the lessons it could learn from competitors. Abramson is in an awkward place when it comes to all this. She can hardly criticise Keller’s take on Twitter, as she hasn’t even got a Twitter account to call her own. She rather sheepishly admits that she has just set one up, but when I ask her when she did so she says: “Today, or yesterday.” Isn’t it a bit weird, I suggest, that the next editor of America’s most important paper, the person vested with the crucial task of steering it through a period of unparalleled digital change, hasn’t even yet sent her first tweet? “It may be weird,” she says. “But I haven’t felt the need until now. I’m an interior kind of person.” She seeks to dig herself out of this hole by promising to step up the pace of digital innovation. She’s got herself an iPad, she says, and says she loves the Huffington Post’s iPad app. “It’s really jazzy.” She also name-checks Arianna Huffington , the website’s charismatic founder. “I’ve known her since the early 90s in Washington and she has invented a site that is interesting a lot of the time. I went and spent a day at the HuffPo and had a lovely lunch with Arianna.” She also promises to tackle the perception of the Times as an institution that hands down the absolute truth, just as she saw it when she was growing up, rather than engaging in a conversation with its readers. Her goal, she says, is not to be an unapproachable voice of supreme authority. “Nobody wants a unitary voice of authority any more. Readers are sceptical about our authority, I’m very aware of that. It’s a question of engaging more than we might have years ago. Our readers are an unbelievable resource to us and yes we have to be more energetic and creative about leveraging the beauty of our online audience.” But she makes clear she has no intention of losing sight of what has made the New York Times great. “I think the authority that we enjoy comes from the depth of our reporting and that is immutable. That will never change.” Jill Abramson New York Times US press and publishing Digital media United States Ed Pilkington guardian.co.uk

Posted by on June 7, 2011. Filed under News, Politics, World News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.