https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/jill-abramson-mistakes-merchants-of-truth_us_5c5f314de4b0eec79b23f5c6
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her resistance to more communication between the business and editorial sides of the newspaper, which an internal “innovation report” had found was necessary to succeed in the digital age. “The fate of the republic seemed to depend more than ever on access to honest, reliable information,” she writes, of our current moment. “But every news company was turning itself upside down to produce and pay for it in the digital age. I determined to capture this moment of wrenching transition–and to do it as a reporter, my first calling.”
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“I didn’t think technological change should sweep in moral change,” you write in the book, about your firing. At the beginning of 2019, has it?
Defining “moral” is somewhat difficult.
It’s your word. That’s why I chose it.
I know. It is my word and has everything to do with not putting somewhat misleading headlines to gain clickbait and scale audience, because that in turn brings advertising. I think that that is a kind of both journalistic and moral change that worries me. I don’t know. The way the news is presented, especially in headlines, is hyped for the same reasons–to track eyeballs and make money.
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that new yorker interview, geez
JA: No it isn’t. You know when I started my career as an investigative reporter at The Wall Street Journal in the relative stone age, our culture and our rhythms were completely governed by the printing press.
KP: I sort of wonder what what we did with all of our time.
JA: Well I know what I did. I was out reporting and hunting for documents and meeting face to face with nervous sources and attending hearings on issues. That to me is that the biggest worry. The atrophying of local journalism and reporting and the disappearance of so many local newspapers means that’s the news that’s closest to people and knows the people, the news organizations that know the people in the community the best, are gone. I don’t think that that’s incidental to why the news media by and large missed the huge anger bubbling up in the middle of the country.
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I want to say seriously that it pains me that there were any mistakes. In a 500-page book I fear it’s inevitable that there are going to be some and the most important thing you can do as a good journalist is correct them ASAP.
KP: You hired a fact checker for the book?
JA: I did.
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KP: The stuff that I found most interesting about the Times was the sort of continuing, ongoing tension around the business side’s effort to find other sources of revenue. They sort of saw news as a potential area to exploit.
JA: Well I think exploit is too strong a word but The New York Times is a for-profit company. I had grown up in a newspaper culture where there was an extremely bright line between the newsroom and the business side. What I experienced was that the business leaders of the Times wanted less of a separation and believed that the journalists in the newsroom had to be heavily involved. I did not want the journalists in the newsroom to be preoccupied with revenue-producing proposals on how to save the Times. I mean no one wanted to save the Times more than me. It’s an irreplaceable institution in America. But it worried me.
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JA: Well that’s probably true. I had given speeches saying how terrible I thought brand advertising and native advertising were because I thought it could sow confusion in readers’ minds. I was told by the new CEO of the Times that the Times just absolutely needed to do native advertising and set up a native advertising studio and that I couldn’t stand in the way.

Posted on February 19, 2019

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