BACK in April, the New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson told us about the T-for-Times tattoo on her back.
One month later Abramson was sacked. Her offence? She had been moaning about her meagre wages.
As executive editor, Abramson’s starting salary in 2011 was $ 475,000, compared to Keller’s salary that year, $ 559,000. Her salary was raised to $ 503,000, and – only after she protested – was raised again to $ 525,000.
She learned that her salary as managing editor, $ 398,000, was less than that of the male managing editor for news operations, John Geddes. She also learned that her salary as Washington bureau chief, from 2000 to 2003, was a hundred thousand dollars less than that of her successor in that position, Phil Taubman.
I’d like to say that I’d edit that newspaper for less than Jill. (Call me NYT – I have ideas.)
Not all journalists have rushed to defend Abramson. Donald G. McNEIL Jr., the New York Times science correspondent, wrote to Jim Romenesko:
A perspective from a member of the Guild’s negotiating team during the 2011-2012 labor struggle. And someone who has been at the Times since 1976.
For those of us in the union, the news that Jill self-destructed over her pay package is bitter. During the negotiations, when we asked newsroom management to fight for us and stop corporate management from gutting our pensions and giving us sub-inflation raises, she carried water for them, making speeches saying we all just had to buckle down and work harder for less. Dean, by contrast, met with us, and listened.
Also, consider this lede, from a 2006 review of “The Lionesses†about female journalists.
I worked for many years as an investigative reporter in Washington, digging into all manner of government grubbiness for The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. In this trench-coated, gumshoe world, I only occasionally encountered other women among the journalists poring over documents in obscure federal agencies or pounding on the closed doors of K Street, the capital’s famous corridor of lobbyists. By long tradition, this was men’s turf. It was telling that one of my colleagues once anonymously described me in a published profile as having “balls like cast-iron cantaloupes.â€
Byline: Jill Abramson. Those of us below the rank of managing editor are simply not allowed to write like that.
Some of us old enough to remember Donald and Ivana Trump’s divorce playing out for weeks on the front pages of the News and Post wish this would all just stop. The only thing Jill could have done more mortifying than the boxing pic would have been to pose in an Angela Davis wig with her fist raised. But this flow of “let’s correct the record†notes also prolongs the tit-for-tat. Public spats hurt the Times
Donald G. McNeil Jr.
Science Correspondent
New York Times
For the kind of money Jill got every year, we could run a website that would smash the NYTimes.
While we’ve been delighted by most of the couture gowns floating down the red carpet in Cannes, France, surprisingly only one look from the 2014 Film Festival made this week’s…
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