New York Times publisher speaks on newsroom turmoil

New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. has given his first interview since the media maelstrom that erupted after he fired the newspaper’s first executive editor, Jill Abramson.

“I would have done it differently,” he said. Sulzberger appointed Dean Baquet, Abramson's deputy, as her successor, some three years after choosing Abramson over Baquet for the newspaper's top editorial job.

Soon after announcing Abramson's dismissal, Sulzberger denied published reports that she had been paid less than her predecessor, a suggestion that turned an internal personnel issue, albeit one at a closely watched, major U.S. newspaper, into a controversy over pay parity, how women are perceived in their jobs and the subtleties of gender-based discrimination in the workplace.

"There is no truth to the charge," that she was paid less than her male counterparts, said Sulzberger who spoke with Vanity Fair on Sunday, which published the interview on its website early Tuesday. "A lot of what's out there is untrue."

Vanity Fair said Abramson declined to comment on Sulzberger's statements to the magazine. But the magazine said a former Times executive recalled that Abramson had raised objections to her compensation when she took the job and felt there was a discrepancy when compared with her predecessor's salary, hiring a lawyer to discuss her compensation. 

Sulzberger said of the May 14 termination that the newspaper “originally drafted the whole thing to be very amicable” but in the end, “Jill said no.”

Abramson, who delivered a commencement speech on Monday but has otherwise remained silent since her dismissal, refused to pursue other interests, spend time with her family or go gently into retirement.

“It wasn’t as though we went out to hurt her,” Sulzberger said. “We didn’t. ... It was my hope for Jill that we could make this go away as peacefully as possible.”

Highlights of the interview include:

— Sulzberger maintains that Abramson’s compensation was at a level more than 10 percent higher than Bill Keller’s had been during his last full year as executive editor, in 2010. 

— Sulzberger believes that between 2011 and 2014 Abramson became slowly alienated from her masthead colleagues. While many past editors were difficult personalities, Sulzberger said that today, an editor needs “managerial skills to be figuring out how to get the data to help us deliver news in a digital age.”

— Sulzberger admitted that, under Abramson, the newspaper soared journalistically. But he said he began to hear more and more concerns. There were complaints that she made decisions without notifying colleagues. “Patterns in the newsroom were becoming more obvious, and colleagues were coming to me,” Sulzberger said.

— He urged Abramson to be a better manager. The Times’s human-resources department helped her find an executive coach. But it eventually became clear to him, he said, that the situation had become “very frayed with Dean, and the rest of the masthead.”

— The breaking point came with Abramson’s attempted recruitment of Janine Gibson, the U.S. editor of the Guardian newspaper. Baquet was aware of the fact that Gibson was being offered a position at the same level as his.  “We said to Jill, ‘You have to bring Dean in on this.’ It was clear Jill needed to bring her leadership team in,” Sulzberger said.

“When Janine told Dean that she’d been offered the job of co-managing editor, he didn’t have a clue,” Sulzberger said.

Things blew up and Sulzberger had to choose between keeping Abramson or Baquet. Sulzberger told Vanity Fair that a number of people came to him, saying that, “The one person we cannot lose is Dean Baquet,” that it was Baquet who was holding the newsroom together. 

 —  From the tenor of the conversation with Vanity Fair, Sulzberger made it clear he wished he had made Baquet his choice for the position when he gave the job to Abramson. He also made it clear that the newspaper “is not a place that penalizes women.”

Al Jazeera and Reuters