Interviewing Former New York Times Executive Editor Jill Abramson (Fieldston Class of 1972)

Jill Abramson is a journalist, author, and professor. Ms. Abramson began her journalism career writing, as a college student, for Time magazine, where she worked from 1973 to 1976. After graduating Harvard University with a degree in literature and history, she worked on Henry Howell’s unsuccessful campaign for governor of Virginia. Following the campaign, Abramson worked at NBC news, helping to cover the 1980 Presidential election. She then joined The American Lawyer as an investigative reporter, and later senior staff reporter, until 1986 when she became the editor-in-chief of the Washington D.C. based Legal Times. In 1988 she took another job in Washington as the as the bureau’s senior reporter for The Wall Street Journal, eventually becoming the bureau chief. Abramson began working for The New York Times in 1997, and in 2000 she was named the paper’s first female Washington D.C. bureau chief. In 2003 Jill Abramson became the first female managing editor of the New York Times, and in 2011 she became their first female executive editor, the top job at the paper. In 2014 she was fired from the New York Times and became a visiting lecturer at Harvard University where she now teaches two courses in journalism.

Throughout her illustrious career, Abramson has written nine books. Her first book, Where They Are Now: The Story of the Women of Harvard Law 1974 (1986), follows the journey of a group of women who graduated Harvard Law in 1974, the first year there was a substantial presence of women at the school. Abramson, and fellow Fieldston graduate, Jane Mayer, co-authored Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas (1994). The book was a bestseller, and it examined the smear campaign waged against Anita Hill, in order to confirm Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court. Her third book, Obama: The Historic Journey (2009) details Barack Obama’s rise to power. In 2011, Abramson turned her wildly successful New York Times column about raising her puppy, Scout, into a book called The Puppy Diaries: Living With a Dog Named Scout. The book was a success. So, from 2011 to 2014, Abramson turned the book into a series of picture books chronicling the dog. The series included Ready or Not Here Comes Scout (2012), Puppy Parade (2013), and Holiday Helper (2014). Her latest book, Merchants of Truth, examines The New York Times, The Washington Post, BuzzFeed, and Vice, and their navigations of the modern media landscape. 

I was fortunate enough to have a zoom call with Ms. Abramson, so we could discuss her career. 

Asher Zemmel: How did you get interested in journalism?

Jill Abramson: “I always liked to write. I was getting more politically aware during my Freshman year of Harvard. The Watergate scandal was building, I was glued to all of the news about that. I was looking for an extracurricular to dive into. It was very arbitrary, I actually started writing little theatre reviews for the Independent. I didn’t even know about the Crimson, which was the more serious paper.”

AZ: You wrote Where They Are Now: The Story of the Women of Harvard Law 1974, and I am interviewing you for your high school’s newspaper. So, why is it important that we continue to hear a diverse array of experiences at educational institutions?

JA: “The arc of people’s lives teach you a lot about the times they live in. The effort to understand our times is an ongoing one.”

AZ: If you didn’t study at Harvard law, then why did you choose to profile students there?

JA: “At that point I was working for a new magazine that had been started by a journalist named Steven Brill, called The American Lawyer. It was a very edgy, happening publication about lawyers. I really had no interest in going to law school, but quickly, working with him, I became interested in how powerful law firms and lawyers wield power in society. I saw from the early days of working there, that women were having a hard time at big law firms, being considered for partner, and facing various forms of discrimination. And of course Harvard Law school itself had very few female students. It had sort of chased Ruth Bader Ginsburg away, foolishly. And, at the point I was writing for The American Lawyer, women had finally become 10% of the students at Harvard Law. I wrote a cover story, with Barbara Franklin, on that group, and then we were approached to write a book, and we got a book deal.

AZ: In 1995 you worked at the Wall Street Journal with another Fieldston alumna, Jane Mayer. You two published Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas, what was it like to work on such a successful and meaningful project with another Fieldston graduate?

JA: “I was a year ahead of her at Fieldston. I knew who she was when I was there, but we were not really friends at that point. If you roll forward to college, she went to Yale and I went to Harvard. We were both stringers for TIME Magazine, and we both ended up filing for the same stories about the college angle on various subjects. When my husband and I moved to Washington in the early 1980s, Jane was one of the first women to cover the White House. We quickly became great friends, and she still is one of my best friends. I was covering the Clarence Thomas-Antia Hill hearings in 1991 for The Wall Street Journal, and she called me up to talk casually about how much fun it would be to write a book together. She said “This is our story. This has politics, race, and sex all together, it’s a great story.” The hearings ended in a mystery with Joe Biden saying “We’ll never know who told the truth”, but Jane and I both believe that with enough digging and reporting you can get to the truth. So we just jumped into it. We worked on it for three years. We concluded that Clarence Thomas had lied, and the book did very well. It was a finalist for the national book award and some other prestigious book awards, and it was a fantastic experience working with Jane. The year after it was published, we were invited together to give the commencement speech at Fieldston, which was a blast.”

AZ: When you first became the Washington bureau chief, what were some of the stories you were covering at the time?

JA: “There was a big scandal at the end of Bill Clinton’s Presidency where he pardoned a lot of people, and it was believed that he pardoned them because they were big donors. I covered the new Bush administration, which was not the most exciting story in the world, until 9/11. Covering 9/11 in Washington involved covering everything about the failures of intelligence leading up to the attack, the White House response, and immediately covering the ramp up for the war in Afghanistan. It was one of the biggest challenges of my career, and it’s something that I’m very proud of.” 

AZ: You have been someone who has consistently held powerful people accountable. How did you manifest this ability to speak truth to power, and does it connect to the values you learned at Fieldston?

JA: “It definitely connects to the values I learned at Fieldston. I can literally remember being in the third grade at Ethical Culture, and Florence Clayburgh, who was Felix Adler’s daughter, came to our classroom and gave us a talk where she asked us to think about if the ends justify the means. I remember her drawing a line on the chalkboard, with “ends” on one end and “means” on the other. She walked us through how to make such a calculation on both moral and ethical terms. It was seriously fundamental to my want of a career that would try to pursue justice and speak up for those who are afraid to or can’t.”

AZ: In 2012, you appeared on Foreign Policy’s list of 500 most powerful people in the world, and you were fifth on Forbes’ list of powerful women. What was it like to see your name on those lists?

JA: “It was silly. I was only on those lists because I was the first female editor of the Times. Compared to some of the world leaders that ranked lower on that Forbes list, it was absurd.”

AZ:  In 2014, you were fired from The New York Times. You had earned a reputation as an excellent journalist, but also as a “tough boss”. You raised questions about your pay and benefits being less than your male predecessor, and you allegedly clashed with other top Times employees. A story surrounding your dismissal alleges that you left the managing editor, Dean Baquet, in the dark about hiring a deputy to him. However, a series of emails revealed that you had put in the time and effort to contact the Times publisher, CEO and Baquet himself. So, what really happened and why were you fired?

JA: “You can read my version of why I was fired in the Merchants of Truth. It was a very difficult time to be the executive editor of the Times. We were deep into the digital transition, but not yet fully reaping the benefits of the digital subscription plan, which has been so successful and really saved The New York Times. My years as both managing editor and executive editor were ones in which we were having to do layoffs and buyouts, it was not a happy time in the newsroom in general. When people are fearful that they are going to lose their jobs, it’s very hard to manage and get the best work you can out of the journalists there, which is obviously mission number one. I think I fulfilled that very well. We won a near-record number of Pulitzer Prizes the first year I was executive editor. In terms of the journalism, it was as good as it’s ever been. We had a new CEO that was desperately looking for a new business model, and I was asked to be focusing a majority of my time on these business issues, which I confess are not my forte. I never went to business school, I wasn’t trained to deal with the product and things that would be revenue generators. I strongly have reservations about mixing our journalists and revenue, expecting the journalists to also be responsible for generating money and leading efforts that were not journalistic for the main part, but that were created as revenue generators. Looking back, some of my concerns were overblown, but I was desperately worried about a conflict of interest causing a scandal. So I definitely clashed with my betters on the business side. I don’t deny that I was a hard-charging and demanding editor with high expectations and standards, but the adjective tough is so typically used for female bosses, even though the same attributes in men are seen as leaderly. I saw a real double standard for most of the time I was executive editor that I didn’t feel as managing editor. The minute the woman gets the top job her likeability goes down, she is seen as too ambitious and too pushy.”

AZ: Why do you think journalism has lagged so much in terms of gender and racial diversity?

JA: “It’s a panoply of different reasons. Not enough attention was paid after most publications hired their first black and female news editors, there’s an inattention to building a pipeline for those behind them. Not enough attention had been paid towards both the hiring and promotion  of Black, Hispanic, Asian-American, and female journalists into top editing jobs. It’s something that has caused me a lot of pain throughout my career, and when I was a manager I tried like crazy to both hire and promote, into the most senior ranks of the Times, people of color, but it was never fast enough and it was never enough.”

AZ: When Times publisher, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., appeared in The New York Times newsroom to announce your dismissal, he appeared without you. Was this a decision you made, and if so why didn’t you make it seem like you were resigning, or at least leaving on good terms?

JA: “I wasn’t there because he didn’t want me there. He didn’t want me to come in. I very much wanted to be there to thank everyone who worked their hearts and souls out. So I felt denied of making any kind of farewell remarks, a privilege that previous editors had received. I’ve devoted my life to telling the truth, and that wasn’t the truth. The truth was that I was fired.” 

AZ: We spoke briefly about ethics in journalism, but, in 2019, a Vice staffer accused you of plagiarism in your book, The Merchants of Truth. For someone who is so experienced in journalism and journalistic ethics, why did you fall short here?

JA: “I fell short, to some degree, of just working too quickly to finish my manuscript, and not noticing that very few passages did not have a specific attribution. All of those sources were credited for other things in the book, so the idea that I would steal work from the same source that I credited is bizarre. The lesson learned is that you are under such pressure with things like book deadlines, so take your time and make sure everything is perfect. That’s where I fell down.”

AZ: Do you think it’s ironic that a large part of your book focuses on the rise of new media, specifically BuzzFeed and Vice, and their role in cancel culture, when they tried to attack you after the book’s publication. 

JA: “They tried and failed to cancel me. I don’t see an irony in it, I see it as an example of a really hideous part of our culture now, which is cancel culture. Vice organized an attack on me, and it’s their right to do so, they were going to take down this book. Anyone who has been a victim of cancel culture, or a tweet storm, knows that it’s destabilizing for the first few days, it’s rough. But I was still invited to the most prestigious book festivals in the world, and I’m just fine.”

AZ: Do you have a favorite article that you have written during your career?

JA: “Definitely. At The Wall Street Journal, with another colleague, we broke the story of offshore illegal chinese donations that were flowing into the Democratic party to re-elect Clinton and Gore. Covering the Anita Hill hearings which lead into the book, Strange Justice, was a favorite. I returned to that a year later when public opinion shifted to believe Anita Hill. I got to cover the beginning of a critical mass of women being elected to the Senate and House of Representatives, which was a reaction to Anita Hill. As an editor I was tremendously proud, in 2012, of publishing the best investigative reporting The New York Times had ever done on Chinese princelings, Apple’s failure to create jobs in the U.S., Walmart paying bribes, and Wall Street’s conduct. It was a great run. That was a high point. 

AZ: Who was your favorite person to interview?

JA: “Hillary Clinton was one of the most interesting people that I’ve both interviewed and written about. I actually first met her in 1978, in Arkansas, and we stayed in touch on and off since then. She struck me as being so smart, capable, and accomplished on her own. My relationship with her definitely had its frosty periods. She felt that The New York Times gave her unfair and harshly negative coverage, starting with Whitewater back in 1992. She did not feel her coverage in The New York Times had been fair. She was angry in 2008, when I ran our Presidential campaign coverage, because I assigned an article that looked at the Clinton marriage. It mainly focused on the fact that if you examined their public schedules, they were rarely in the same place at the same time. She hated that piece. She hated investigative pieces we did about the Clinton foundation, and she hated that I assigned someone to cover her full time. My relationship with her has definitely had ups and downs.”

AZ: Did you have a favorite class at Fieldston, and if so, who taught it?

JA: “Earl Clemons taught it, and it was 11th grade Modern European History. I remember the exam was just a copy of Karl Marx’s The Communist Manifesto, and we were told to write an essay about the year 1848. I still think it’s the best exam that anyone has ever given.”

AZ: Do you look back at your time at Fieldston fondly?

JA: “Oh yeah! I’m still really really tight friends with a lot of the people who were in my Fieldston class. Most of the people in my class turned 65 sometime over the last year, and we all showed up for each other’s birthdays. There is a core group of four or five of us who see each other much more frequently.”

Thank you to Ms. Abramson for agreeing to this interview, and for speaking so openly about her life and career.