Jill Abramson out at the NY Times, and there's more coverage of it than when the House refuses to govern on a daily basis. So, interested in the Abramson story? Is it sexism, is it more? Here's some of the most interesting coverage.
Start here. Vox storifies NPR's David Folkenflik:
1. Sulzberger had initially been conflicted about picking Abramson - for top slot - AS had long seen Baquet as a future exec editor
— @davidfolkenflik
4b. Thompson also livid that Abramson sent investigative ed to UK to see if he had any role in BBC's brewing child abuse coverup scandal
— @davidfolkenflik
Danielle Kurtzleben/Vox:
What happened to Jill Abramson shows everything that sucks about being a woman leader
Begin at the beginning. Abramson was appointed to her position in 2011 — a horrible time for newspapers. That fits. In a 2005 paper, researchers from the University of Exeter coined the term "glass cliff" to refer to the tendency of poorly performing companies to appoint women leaders during periods of maximum turmoil. The result is women end up taking the helm of companies during periods of hard choices and painful cuts that can make success seem nearly impossible.
Ken Auletta/New Yorker:
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, needed to retreat on some of its generous pay and pension benefits; Abramson had also been at the Times for far fewer years than Keller, having spent much of her career at the Wall Street Journal, accounting for some of the pension disparity. Eileen Murphy, a spokeswoman for the Times, said that Jill Abramson’s total compensation as executive editor “was directly comparable to Bill Keller’s”—though it was not actually the same. I was also told by another friend of Abramson’s that the pay gap with Keller was only closed after she complained. 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. A third associate told me, “She found out that a former deputy managing editor”—a man—“made more money than she did” while she was managing editor. “She had a lawyer make polite inquiries about the pay and pension disparities, which set them off.”
More politics and policy below the fold.
Kate Aurthur/Buzzfeed:
It wasn’t long into Abramson’s editorship before horror stories began to leak out. From the inside, some friends told me things felt bad; from the outside, they looked pretty crazy. In a power grab over the website (and Jim Roberts, who oversaw it and is now Mashable’s editor-in-chief), Abramson ended NYTimes.com’s independence as its own operation, and the desks began reporting up through print, which digital people will tell you is never welcome. (And is always a bad idea.) Abramson had her allies and fans, of course, but it seemed like a smaller circle than editors usually (and should) have surrounding them — and telling them no. And people like assistant managing editor Rick Berke, who had once been a close confidante, somehow ended up leaving anyway. During buyouts, she shoved out popular editors such as Roberts and Jonathan Landman. Last year, she fired Hugo Lindgren as the editor of the magazine. She also clashed with Mark Thompson, the CEO whom Sulzberger hired from the BBC in 2012 — a natural occurrence for the business side versus edit, but now one of them is gone.
With Abramson out, Thompson is further empowered. And Baquet will be the new editor, the first African-American in the job in the company’s history. (Abramson, of course, was the first woman in the job.)
And in non-Jill Abramson news (yes, there is some)...
Fernando Espuelas:
While Republicans battle each other, they are blind to the iceberg they're about to ram — with catastrophic consequences.
In spite of being warned of the existential danger they face if Latinos continue to vote by wide supermajorities for Democrats, Republicans insist on isolating themselves by serially blocking immigration reform, thereby provoking mass-scale anger among the fastest-growing voter group in America.
According to the Pew Research Center, approximately 50,000 American Latinos turn 18 years old each month. There are now about 23 million voting-eligible Hispanics in the country.
Arturo Vargas, executive director of the nonpartisan National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials, recently told me on my show that if Latinos' voter participation continues to grow cycle after cycle, eventually reaching the level of non-Hispanic white and African-American voters, the Latino vote would be decisive in California, Texas, Florida, Illinois, Colorado, Arizona, Nevada and New Mexico.
In other words, Hispanics will be in the position to stop Republicans from being elected to statewide office (as has already happened in California) – or ever again reaching the White House.
Republicans, meet your iceberg.
Harry Enten:
Figuring out who will win a Senate election that’s months away requires figuring out what matters and how much it matters. Does the president’s popularity affect Senate races? Or should you only look at the horse-race polling?
FiveThirtyEight hasn’t released its Senate model yet, and different statistical models look at different things. But simple models tend to do well. Last month, I analyzed Senate elections since 2006 and showed that even early polls (taken from in the first half of an election year) have been a better predictor of the outcome than the president’s approval rating. Although presidential approval still matters.
Michael Hiltzik:
But first, let’s turn to a commencement-related issue that gets much less attention than it deserves: the grotesque prices that many campus speakers demand for their appearances. [Condi] Rice, for example, was in line to collect $35,000 along with her honorary doctorate from Rutgers—apparently not enough to steel her against some harsh words from the gallery. Her invoice put her well ahead of two previous Rutgers speakers, Nobel-winning novelist Toni Morrison, who got only $30,000 for the 2011 commencement, and "Jersey Shore" personality Snooki, who held out for $32,000 for a non-commencement appearance that same year.
Other speakers on the university circuit have done as well, or better. About 30% of colleges and universities pay for commencement addresses, as a lecture expert told my colleague Carla Hall in 2011.
LOLGOP on the MI Senate race:
If a Democrat can win by challenging his opponent’s science know-nothingness in an off-year, it means the GOP’s hopes of making the state competitive in a presidential year with their current views on climate change are dead. Republicans may be forced to recalibrate their anti-science views back to 2007, when the science was less alarming and conservatives weren’t afraid to accept some climate reality.
Or in the least, gobbledygook climate change denials like we’re hearing from [GOP candidate Terri Lynn] Land and Marco Rubio will become a serious liability for Republican candidates.