NYTimes Reporter Provides Insight Into Abramson Firing

David Carr

On Sunday, David Carr -- one of the reporters who wrote the story announcing Abramson's ouster -- published a column on the Times website titled "Editor’s Exit at The Times Puts Tensions on Display" that offers insight into the "surreal" meeting at The Times' offices last week, according to THR.

"When The Times’ publisher, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., stood up at a hastily called meeting in the soaring open newsroom where we usually gather to celebrate the Pulitzers and said that Jill was out, we all just looked at one another," Carr writes. "How did our workplace suddenly become a particularly bloody episode of Game of Thrones? It is one thing to gossip or complain about your boss, but quite another to watch her head get chopped off in the cold light of day. The lack of decorum was stunning."

Carr also agrees with Sulzberger's assertion that "she had lost the support of her masthead colleagues and could not win it back."

He writes: "I like Jill and the version of The Times she made. But my reporting, including interviews with senior people in the newsroom, some of them women, backs up his conclusion."

He notes that one "big tactical mistake" she made was in failing to notify Baquet that she had hired The Guardian senior editor Janice Gibson as co-managing editor for digital.

"Dean was not aware that Jill had made an offer to Ms. Gibson, and he was furious and worried about how it would affect not only him but the rest of the news operation as well," he writes, adding: "When Dean let Arthur know that he would leave the paper because he found the situation untenable, it was clear that an important insurance policy for the newspaper's future was going to leave the building."

Calling it a "grinding spectacle," Carr adds that Sulzberger was likely not prepared to handle the media storm that followed Abramson's firing, even though people close to him say he was aware that "his decision would create an uproar."

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