Jill Abramson

Published Feb 4, 2013, 5:00 AM

In this 2013 interview with Alec, the former New York Times executive editor talked about how she grew up in a family where the paper was so vaunted that two copies were delivered to her house. Some media critics have speculated that this interview may have been a factor in Abramson's dismissal.

Abramson was the first woman to hold the top editorial position at the paper. She told Alec that she took a “particular interest in the careers and work of many of the younger women at The Times and ... if anyone [had] a problem with that, too bad.”

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This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to here's the thing. In two thousand eleven, Jill Abramson became executive editor of the New York Times, the first woman ever to hold that position. On the day of her appointment, she was quick to acknowledge those who had transformed the role of women in journalism before her. She cited, among others, Anna Quinland, Maureen Dowd, and Nan Robertson, a reporter at the paper for over three decades, but there's no denying that Jill had put in her time. She was the Times Washington bureau chief and then it's managing editor before she was offered the big job at her hometown paper, currently based on Eighth Avenue between forty one Street on the West Side of Manhattan. I am totally a west Side or My parents were actually both born at home on the Upper west Side. I mean everyone on both sides of my family. No, they still live on the Upper west Side, like stacked together. I just feel like I'm walking in my sixth grade. For you, it's home. It's very much home. So he went to Harvard to study history, history and literature. Yeah, and was writing something in some fashion. Writing was what was on your horizon from the beginning. From back then, I knew I always liked to write, but it wasn't that I set out to be a journalist. Freshman year um was two for me, which sounds like the Stone Age, but it was, you know, the McGovern Nickson election. It was the dawn of Watergate. And so all through my college years, Woodward and Bernstein, you know, I just like glued to their reporting and thrilled by that coverage. It seemed so ground raking and brave to me. So I kind of fell in love with, at least the journalism end of writing. I always liked to write, was a fairly fascile rioter. But when you leave Harvard in seventies six, if I'm not mistaken, you go pretty heavily into the world of law. You were. The first writing you did was with the first job I had in journalism was for Time Magazine and Boston. I had been a stringer, which is a part time reporter for them in college. So how long did that last? That lasted two years? So that's your apprenticeship. That was my apprenticeship. And what kind of thing did you cover there? Oh? You name it? From the hot socks craze back then to bus sing. I mean it was from lifestyle to big issues unfolding. Where do you go from there? Well, what I did after time as I worked in the election unit of NBC News. I'm a total political junkie, and uh work there, and I met Steve Brill, who's another prominent journalist here whose specialty was law, and Steve and I just got friendly, and he was starting the American Lawyer magazine. And while lawyers didn't particularly interest me, a number of journalists who I knew from Harvard or or in New York had gone to work for him because it was going to be a writer early kind of investigative magazine that wasn't cheering on lawyers, but was really examining the power that lawyers and law firms wheeled behind legal perspective. So that is so when that was brand new, I cast and I worked for that magazine for a couple of years, and then Steve bought a legal newspaper in Washington called Legal Times, and when I was thirty, he's said, poof, I'm making you the editor of this newspaper. And I moved to Washington and did that and you're ready to be the editor of something I don't. I certainly didn't think I was ready, but he thought I was ready. How long were you there? I was there for a long time. I was there for about seven or eight years and working for Steve both in New York and in Washington. And then I went to the Wall Street Journals for people who are late, people like myself. The journalist obviously of you now as a pretty right of center organization, the opinion page and so forth. And I'm not going to characterize you as being either direction of center, but was that in an interesting experience for you? How would you characterize the political culture of the journal? Then? The political culture of the journal then was set. The editorial pages were extremely conservative. I mean Paul Jego, who was the editor of those pages now is the of Bob Bartley, who was for a very long time the editor of the editorial journalism at Giant Conservative. And uh, you know, operating as a news reporter in Washington at the Journal, like at the New York Times, there's a traditional separation between the editorial department and editorial views of the paper and news gathering. And but you know, a lot of people don't know that. Even a lot of political people in Washington didn't know it. So in Washington it was actually it advantaged me because in for example, when Gingrich took over the House, like, there were Republicans who would gladly talk to me. I have I have always had good Republican sources because I think they felt I can trust you because you're from the Wall Street Journal. And so it was interesting, it was sometimes awkward because in it, wellour Jane Mayor of the New Yorker who was then at the Journal, and I wrote a book about the Clarence Thomas Anita Hill. Did you have to get permission from Norm Pearl Starte and then Paul ste on the other side of the screen, right, And you know, Jane and I worked on that book for several years and found, you know, by doing a lot of in depth reporting that we thought the weight of evidence for sure was that Anita Hill had told the truth. Then there had been a big campaign on the right to destroy her credibility, not only during the hearings themselves, but in the years after and when our book was published at made you know, pretty big spot that it wasn't my first book, but was uh the book that I'm proudest to have. And why would you say it was it? Was? It a combination of all these things. But was it what happened to Hill? The way they dealt with Hill. I think why um the book was so important is that, uh, those hearings ended and everyone in Washington just said it's he said, she said, and we'll never know. And for me, that is bait. I really believe if you do enough digging, in enough reporting, you can find the truth in most and act accordingly. But why it created awkwardness at the Journal is that when the book came out, even though the journal's news pages ran an excerpt of the book, the editorial page wrote an editorial like ripping, ripping, so that you're passing in the in the hallway. In fact, it was post pause, you go himself, He'll let you know in no uncertain terms in writing fact, that's right, how straightforward with him? No, it's was his right, that's your business. What I always walk away from the Thomas event was that in the arc of decades of political life in this country, there's a kind of a score that some people keep a moral score that kind of like you guys had your chap aquittic when they're like, some of our guys are going to get a pass, like some of your guys got to pass. They don't push too hard here on the Thomas things. So he did some injrew things to this woman. That's a very perceptive point, because Bork had gone down in flames after a very vigorous liberal campaign against him, and so there was a feeling of not again. Right, So when you're at the Journal and you've got the first Bush term and the first Clinton term, while you're at the Journal, Yeah, what was it like for you covering Washington in the scene between those two? What was it like covering the Bush White House? What was it like covering the Clinton White House? The Bush white House was, you know, not that different from what the Reagan White House had been. Do you have much interaction with Bush himself? No. I had an investigative beat on the nexus of money in politics. So I wasn't the White House car respondent ever at the Journal or at the Times. I was always an investigative reporter on the political team. And who was responsible would you say for the time as being as concerned about campaign finance issues as they were then? Was it you was it Were they saying to yes in that direction? I think the Times wanted to haire me because that was a big strength of mine. I was well known for covering at and had um at the Journal covered just about every scandal of the eighties and early to mid nineties set. When the Citizens United case came down, how did you feel about that? Well, you know, I I thought it definitely would change, uh the landscape of how money was raised and spent in the election, and and I think it and other court decisions did because we were in this sort of wild west of spending UH and the advent of the super PACs and all of that in the campaign. It didn't really surprise me because you know you had asked about Bush before. UM. George Herbert Walker Bush actually built uh the state of the art big money machine that was called Team one hundred back in his day, and that was UM involving big soft money donations which were ultimately outlawed. But in some ways, you know, Tip O'Neill was right money fund away, UH. So mainly I just knew it would have a big impact, UH and that it would create a lot of great stories for the Times, which it did, and then Clinton came in, and how was that different for you? Clinton, of course had his own set of fundraising excesses in his nineties six reelection campaign. That was when he was having the White House sleepovers in the Lincoln Bedroom for big dardenings, right exactly. So that's why the Times like wanted me because the journal was beating the Times on that story. And then uh, Maureen Dowd accosts you somewhere and uh, she's got some ideas for you. Maureen walked up to me. It was at a book party for Michael Kelly, who's another great journalist who's sadly died in in Ira. But it was at a book party for him. Um, and the Times was getting a new bureau chief in Washington, and I knew more. And in fact, we sat across a table much like we're sitting at now, across from each other during the Clarence Thomas Anita Hill hearings, which is kind of where we bond. Uh. She came up to me at the book party and she said, do you know of any good women we can hire? And so I looked at her with us kind of what am I chop liver look? And she said you would never leave the journal. And I said, oh, what you think, because I was like doing really well there and she just didn't think I would want to. But what she didn't know is that, you know, I grew up in a family that had to print home delivery subscriptions to the Times because my mom didn't like anyone touching the section that had the puzzle own. Uh. And you know, every time I had a front page piece in the journal, my mother's brother would have to calm my parents and say, go by the journal. Jilli's got a front page piece. Yeah, you know the New York Times was you know, the total voice of authority was my father. That was the way it wasn't my So Maureen says this to you, guys, are you have the one of my chopped liver moment with ma And then and she had like the new bureau chief called me up for lunch, and uh, he made me a job offer, and I came. And then Morien and I became completely inseparable. And how long did were you in that position? I was in the Washington Bureau from nineties seven. I went into editing there. I became the deputy bureau chief to micro Riscus who was hired me and then after the two thousand Stalemate campaign, I became bureau chief and then I had that job for three years. And so covering the Clinton impeachment, did you did you well? I mean I was in I was in Africa at the time, huh watching the proceedings didn't miss you know. I watched it on the BBC on Sky TV in the in South Africa where I was with my ex wife while she made a film, and we watched it. For me, I always wondered, did anybody really cover the Clinton impeachment as well as they might have? I think what was true is that, you know, every reporter who was covering the main proceedings was probably getting more information from the Prosecutor's office, from Ken Star's office than they were through reporting around the president. And mainly more people should have been reporting on what actually had happened and how this case di up. And at the Times, I you know, the Times was lucky in that they have a big bureau and they sicked Uh an investigative reporter named Don van Atta and and me onto uh on two Stars office. And I had some very good sources around the White House in the White House, and also from my years of covering the legal community in conservative legal circles. And what Don and I did is show that it was Monica Winsky Linda Tripp. Didn't you know, Linda Trip didn't appear on ken Star's doorstep. Serendipitously that ever since a very conservative magazine named The American Spectator had surface and named Paula Jones, there was this plan with a bunch of young, relatively unknown conservative lawyers working to make that into the case that being on in the basis of those are the two sticks they were up together to get the whole thing going. You know, it's interesting because as for someone again as a late person, you look at the arc of political coverage, and you wonder where there are advances like glaciers almost in retreats of the power and the authority of investigative journalism in the post Ellsberg, in the post water Gate, like that was a time in which the kind of vesuvius of all this kind of work changed the course of our country. And do you find now that when, especially in your position now, people will come to you like I know that if I worked at the times, I'm assuming it wouldn't be diminished by the fact that I was experienced and I was trained, I went to Columbia, I'd still have my nature. And if my nature was to come to you and say, man, I got a story of you. I found out this stuff about this and this and this. Do you literally have to say to yourself, we can we have so much of that in the paper. No, I don't say that, but when someone is so eager a little bit, I have a skeptical side, which is also saying, you know, we have to independently report and see as this really the great story, because you know, there have been a number of cases in journalism, some of them at the times, where you're getting all kinds of leaks from a prosecutor and you know, well that wasn't from from a prosecutor, that was from Iraqi defectors, mainland government officials. But where you're getting you know only one side of it. But you know, since you mentioned, uh, Judy Miller, I think that that's actually a great case that I think about all the time because I was Washington Bureau chief at that time, and Judy didn't work for me, but she did a lot of reporting viously in Washington and at the Bush, White House and other places, and where the Iraqi defectors were telling these you know, stories about Saddam supposed active w m D programs and uh, these same defectors had told their stories to people inside the government. So in some ways, like the government sources pretended that they were confirming the information given by the defectors. But it was like one horrible feedback loop. And meanwhile that was very loud because the defectors and the people in the government were aiding you know, journalists to focus on these stories and in real time. I don't think I appreciated this as I should have. There were dissident analysts at the CIA who you know, were very doubtful of the EVA. With your perspective on history, do you in any way have more sympathy for Bush forty three and Shaney in that crowd for the way they reacted in the post nine eleven world or did they acted improperly based on the information they had. I think it's a combination. The Iraq connection. We could certainly today, but I think they there was real reason to feel after nine eleven. I was in Washington, we had you know, tax in front of our building. You know, it was a change world than that immediate post nine eleven period. You know, it felt Yeah, I mean on nine eleven, Uh, we did so many stories that day out of Washington's more stories than we've ever had. And the story list from that day still hang outside of the Bureaucuese office. And you know, I didn't get home until I don't know, three o'clock in the morning or so, and drove right past the burning Pentagon, and you know, my whole way home, you know, there were flags already up on all the streets. And then I got home to our house and you know, even my husband, who isn't such a you know, overt patriot, had hung our absurdly large Fourth of July flag, And you know, at that point I just sat in my car and kind of absorbed like it was changed. But that doesn't justify such a you know, misreading of intelligence and such an aggressive sales campaign for a war big Ston. Yeah, supposed dangers that we're not. How long did you stay in Washington after the attack of nine eleven, You were there to a wint one year. I um left in the summer of two thousand and three to go and to do to become the managing managing Now, so this is the beginning of a kind of a management the management phase of your career. Correct. I mean, you were right. It was sudden because at that point the executive editor and managing editors of the time it's had both been fired. And when you became managing editor, how did that condemn? What was the time of tumult at the paper was after the Jason Blair scandal, after big questions were being raised about that period of leadership and also about our pre war coverage. You know, no one came and said we're looking for a woman. But you know I was already in the leadership ranks as Washington Bureau chief. That's big time job. You know that James Riston had another lions of of journalism, and you know Bill Keller was named the new executive editor, and I had always thought the world of him, and you know he picked me. Was it a hard seller? Were you ready? Did you want to go back to New York too? Yeah? I hadn't really thought about coming back to New York, but because Washington seems so much more pure. I don't say it as a compliment to myself, but it was very much my test. Yes, my kind of town. Did you did you think about that career wise? Was management going to become a step back for you creatively? Even now? I mean, the idea that I could ever be managing editor of The New York Times, which is the number two jobs, just seemed like incredible. This was two thousand three, when, after only two years as executive editor, Howell Raines was forced out due to the Jason Blair plagiarism scandal. Rains had worked closely with Abramson when she was in Washington, and their relationship had been a difficult one. Eight years later, she had rains old job and strong ideas about the kind of boss she wanted to be coming up. Abramson talks about what she wants in a story. This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to. Here's the thing. The newspaper business is in trouble. Print readership is plummeting, and although digital subscriptions of The New York Times have exceeded expectations, the Times is still navigating toward a new way of doing business. The New York Times staff has seen three rounds of buyouts in the last four years. Despite this, Jill Abramson didn't hesitate when she got the call from the Times publisher Arthur Salzburger. It was the brass ring and I jumped for it. And you know, I certainly knew that the newspaper industry certainly has been going through you know, rough waters, and that there are you know, secular changes in our industry. But I also have always known that the Times News report is like none other and that I think it's an indispensable institution and society, the Times, including editorial and all aspects of of our news report, And I just have always believed that it's so worth paying for that it you know, it didn't seem to me so odd. Everyone was saying that our pay subscription plan was a rash move and that news wants to be free and it would never work, and it has created a very significant revenue stream for us. It was a very smart decision of Arthur's to to go that way. And how do you juice that up a little bit? I mean, what's the strategy you must have some where you can how are you going to build build build that online presence. Well, we're gonna build on our digital subscription base for sure. What's the obstacle to getting people to because people will say, why pay when it's free, But it's not really free. Some of it's free. That our strategy is smart, that what we've on is for people who are you know, inveterate readers and frequent users of our website, we've asked them to pay. You know, they want to read many articles and spend significant time on our website. And yet we have a kind of basic good to go. You know, if you want on our apps, the top stories, you can look at those. If you come, you know, from a link from another site, you can read what you want to read. It's it's flexible. It lets us stay part of the open web while asking people who can't live without to pay something for it. Now you would come to the paper, I would assume it's like someone once said to me about um political figures. I remember when Giuliani was the mayor of New York, someone said to me that very often people will bring to these jobs the spirit of what they're previous career was. So Giuliani's job as a prosecutor was to catch people doing bad things. So he brought that to the mayoralty. His job as mayor was to catch bad people doing things. You know, uh, and you're kind of a crime stopper, mayoralty if you will. And I wonder if the same is true for you in your job as executive editor, meaning you had your beat, so to speak, you had your desk, you've had your coverage, most of it Washington based. Do you bring to the job your passion and and everybody knows that there's something can be done about it? Or did you have to did you have to broaden your passions in order to do the job. Well, my my interests were pretty broad. I grew up here in New York and I was like a mini version of a culture vulture. And you know, when when I was small and I'm a huge reader of books and articles about many things, sub ranging appetites going in I did and basically wouldn't. But I have a singular passion. And the singular passion with any subject is the story behind the store. You know, if if if it's the Metropolitan Museum choose as a new head, which they did Tom Campbell a couple of years ago. I want to know, like what happened behind the scenes and what role did a Nette de Laurent to play and the choice and there's always like a kind of juicy story but behind the public stage that you're onto which events unfold. And I love that kind of story, and it can be about anything. We have, you know, an investigative story coming pretty soon about the world of auctions that I'm incredibly excited about. Yeah. The other side of the coin for me as a New Yorkers The Times, of course, is the you go through a period in your twenties and thirties where you like what The Times tells you to like in terms of film and theater and so forth, restaurants. I mean The Times as an arbiter of culture in this city and beyond like no other publication ever. Is that one of the roles you play where you have to kind of deal with that, where you know The Times has the power to aid in a debt certain enterprise here or destroy them. I think you know you mentioned restaurant reviews, and I actually I shouldn't laugh for the one you had with Guy fieria Um, but Frank Bruney when he was our restaurant critic, actually because the critics often will go three times to a restaurant before they write their reviews, and Frank was reviewing a downtown restaurant. Uh. And I went with him on his second visit, and I could just tell he did. He would never say whether he liked or didn't like at that point, but um, at one point in the meal, he looked at me and he said, because he was tasted what I was having. The peas in your dish are camp. And then his review, which was really one of the best written things that eviscerated this restaurant. And he described in his first visit how he had witnessed the Poseidon Adventure of Wine Spill, which just like and you know my brain that that restaurant did close short thereafter. Maureen came to me once and she said, would you like to come with Frank to review a restaurant. She said, I'm gonna put together a quartet of people as you and I and Frank and a fourth and she said, he and here's how it works to orders for us, and he has to be able to taste everything. And then and then when we're sitting with Frank, he takes me through how it works. He told me how he got the job, blah blah blah. And I said to him, where do you live? He said, I live on the Upper West Side. I said, you're kidding. I said, that's the restaurant. Wise, that's the most bankrupt part of Manhattan. He said, I know, he goes, but I have to live near the park. I have to go running every day. He was, I'm meeting lunch and dinner out twenty eight out of thirty days out of the month. And it was really really a thrill to be with him and to have him tell me what he happened for and what he was what he was focusing on. But you had the thing with Fieri's restaurant, which reminded you of the residents the paper has. But if you could say, I mean people used to joke, consider that there was a you know, a pipeline from Morningside Heights and the Columbia School of Journalism to Fort Street, and an argument could be made, I suppose I'll live to get your opinion about this. Whether The Times was the bastion of Ivy League types of men and women, but mostly men in the fifties and on into the sixties. And if the complexion, if the stripe, if you would the dominant stripe, that fabric was Ivy League men for many many years. What would you characterize it as. Now, who's coming to you for a job and who are you hiring? I mean, right now we're hiring you know, a lot of people that have digital skills, as we're hiring videographers or technology. Percentage of the people working with you now are men and how many are women? Women are thirty seven percent. You're a woman who's the first person in this job, and I'm wondering how much of that do you get in the sense that people expect you as a woman to help lift up that the rising tide of Jill Abramson is going to raise all female boats now at the time, Well, in part I expect that of myself. I mean, I don't expect that I can ever raise all female boats, but I try to go out of my way, not to the exclusion of of men. But I do take a particular interest in the careers and work of many of the younger women at the time. And I'm like open about if anyone has a problem with that, too bad. What sympathies do you have for Howell Rains today that you didn't have two years ago, since you took this job, I have many, Yeah, I mean I have sympathy with the fact that he was such. He was really a great rioter, and he had lots of story ideas and he could see in his mind side how he wanted them to come out. On the other end, it was very frustrating to him when things didn't wind up the way he hoped they were. And uh, when I was on the receiving end of that displeasure when he think some of the work when I was Washington Bureau Chief that was coming from the political correspondence in the Washington Correspondence fell short. He seemed sometimes impatient and too quick to be angry. But I think my sympathy is he had high standards but very little time. Your day is so crowded with you know, I'm scheduled with not fifteen minutes segments every day, and that, you know, can make you irritable when what you most care about is the quality of the journalism itself, and you have you know, you would think that would be the thing you spend all of your time on, but it's not. Especially now, would you say, with the financial imperatives, mean when the time is from But I think it just always there have been, you know, issues from the business side of the Times and other things that like take your mind away from a focus on what is the smartest way, and to guns, sir, any of the things we're covering right now. And he seemed too impatient to me when I was Washington Bureau Chief and he was the boss. And now I completely understand that in a way I didn't. As someone who was a great admirer of the Times and does depend on the Times for the truth, I read the Times cover to cover every even in the morning, I read half and I read the other half of the night when I'm lying in bed. Well, what's the first thing most people read in the Times? They tell you the cap shuttings and the front page photos. If they're reading the print paper, I go to one column first because it's usually the best riding. It's the most moving riding, which is the obituaries every morning. It's some of the most beautiful. It's incredible. It's the little digest bio of someone's life. It's an art. In the midst of talking with Jill about her career, I neglected to ask her about another important part of her life. In May two thousand seven, early one morning, Jill Abramson was struck by a truck and nearly killed while crossing the street just blocks from the New York Times building. So I called her up to find out what kind of impact that event had on her. It's Alec Baldwin calling for Jill Abramson. This is it's you. It's you. Well you know we we are calling you. And Abramson spent three weeks in Bellevue Hospital with a broken femur and a fractured hip. Two years after her accident, she took home out a Golden Retriever. She'll be four and April. So then wind it back and that's when she came into our law. Yeah, two thousand and nine, that feels right. Uh, and yeah, she was obviously a tiny thing when we first got her. We got her as a puppy. We didn't um adopt her. We got her from a breeder. And you know, I didn't know it at the time that it was you know, my husband was the one who pushed hardest, and my two children also for us to get a new dog. Are um we we had had a dog, a terrier who had passed away. Yeah, just a little bit before I had my accident, and uh, you know it turned out to be, as the cliche says, just what the doctor or uh, frankly, I did it when I had my my two children, just ridiculously obsessed with every aspect of puppy life. And my husband and I were at the stage of life where we were empty nesters, and you know, I just I think we're both built to take care of living things. And you know, we found ourselves in you know, puppy kindergarten and you know, worrying that that scalt you know, was the worst student in the class, which she somewhat was. And I found, you know that, especially late at night, walking the dog in New York I lived downtown near the Hudson River is the best way to kind of get rid of whatever anxiety and intention you might have from the day's work. And Jill Abramson's work continues every day. Her job is to take care that the news coverage of The New York Times remains unbiased, and to take care of her special friend. She's just a bundle of constant that both joy and trouble, as you all no doubt know from your experience with with your dogs. This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to here's the thing,

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