I missed this yesterday, because my Dad’s been in the hospital for the past week. He is coming home today. The doctor said he had COPD; and thought at first that he might have had a light heart attack, but yesterday told me, that he doubted that now.
Anyhow, this one must have hit late yesterday and I missed it.
Via The New Yorker Blog Currency:
Fellow-journalists and others scrambled to find out what had happened. Sulzberger had fired Abramson, and he did not try to hide that. In a speech to the newsroom on Wednesday afternoon, he said, “I chose to appoint a new leader of our newsroom because I believe that new leadership will improve some aspects …” Abramson chose not to attend the announcement, and not to pretend that she had volunteered to step down.
As with any such upheaval, there’s a history behind it. Several weeks ago, I’m told, Abramson discovered that her pay and her pension benefits as both executive editor and, before that, as managing editor were considerably less than the pay and pension benefits of Bill Keller, the male editor whom she replaced in both jobs. “She confronted the top brass,” one close associate said, and this may have fed into the management’s narrative that she was “pushy,” a characterization that, for many, has an inescapably gendered aspect. Sulzberger is known to believe that the Times, as a financially beleaguered newspaper, has had to retreat on some of its generous pay and pension benefits; Abramson had also been at the Times for many fewer years than Keller, having spent much of her career at the Wall Street Journal, accounting for some of the pension disparity. (I was also told by another friend of hers that the pay gap with Keller has since been closed.) But, to women at an institution that was once sued by its female employees for discriminatory practices, the question brings up ugly memories. Whether Abramson was right or wrong, both sides were left unhappy.
Needless to say, both side of the political aisle are all over this. Seems that the NYT is taking its cue from the 2008 election, where a black man basically pushed out a white woman; ironic isn’t it? What was this thing about the “War on women” that the Democrats are always yowling on about all the time?
Related:
- Dylan Byers / Politico: Jill Abramson to exit New York Times
- Joe Pompeo / Capital New York: Invitation to a beheading: How Times editors learned of Abramson’s ouster
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