Fired NYT Exec Ed Jill Abramson's voice is heard in the land, plus another fired woman editor is heard from

You can watch Jill Abramson's Wake Forest commencement speech today here.

by Ken

With all due respect to Wake Forest University, no doubt a fine institution, it seems to safe to say that as of a couple of weeks ago its commencement today would have been of little interest to anyone outside the university community. But the scheduled commencement speaker was then-NYT Executive Editor Jill Abramson, and in light of recent events, the world at large descended on Winston-Salem, NC.

As the Washington Post's Manuel Roig-Franzia reports ("Jill Abramson tells Wake Forest graduates to ‘show what you are made of’"):

Ousted New York Times editor Jill Abramson told graduates here to “show what you are made of” when facing adversity.

“I’m talking to anyone who’s been dumped,” Abramson said to knowing chuckles from the large crowd.

The night before her speech, Abramson said, a student asked whether she would have her now-famous tattoo of the Times’s iconic script T logo removed. “Not a chance!” she said.

The announcement of Abramson’s appearance had electrified the small group of journalism students at this picturesque Southern campus. Annie Johnson, a reporter and editor at the student newspaper who graduated Monday, fired out an e-mail to everyone she knows.

“We’ve been fan-girling hard!” said Johnson, a 22-year-old communications major and journalism minor from Cape Cod, Mass., who will be interning this summer at NPR in Washington.

Abramson’s wrenching departure from the Times transformed what might have been a languid and routine event at this campus on the former estate of tobacco baron R.J. Reynolds. More than 30 news organizations scrambled for credentials, and reporters crowded into the front row in front of a large yellow-and-white striped tent where Abramson delivered her remarks. At a typical Wake Forest graduation, no more than five or six media organizations show up. But Abramson’s emergence as a symbol of the challenges faced by women in the workplace — and as an object of scorn by her detractors — turned the graduation into something of a happening. An estimated crowd of 12,000, including 1,800 graduates, crammed into Hearn Plaza in the heart of this campus, on a brisk, bright morning to hear Abramson’s remarks, which were her first since being fired on Wednesday as the top editor of the Times.

“What’s next for me?” she said. “I don’t know. So I’m in exactly the same boat as many of you.”

Noting the large media gathering, Abramson cracked at one point, “I’m impressed that your achievements have attracted so much media attention.” . . .

ACTUALLY, WHAT INTERESTS ME MOST IN THE
POST STORY COMES RIGHT AT THE VERY END

In the last two sentences we learn that Abramson --

had to do some quick editing of her address over the past several days. A Wake Forest official said the original draft of her speech — submitted before her firing — focused on the importance of media freedom, a topic she barely touched on Monday.

I won't be surprised to learn that I am the most innocent soul in America, and the only one who's surprised to learn that commencement speakers submit actual texts of their proposed speeches to the host institution. Nevertheless, let me say, "Huh???" It's one thing for the speaker to provide a description of what he/she plans to talk about, and then a text for public distribution on the day of. But an actual text, days in advance? As if, as I presume, that text is subject to approval, or -- what? -- back-and-forth negotiation?


EX-PHILLY INQUIRER EDITOR AMANDA BENNETT
REACTS PERSONALLY TO THE ABRAMSON FIRING

In a new Washington Post opinion piece, "Women falling off the glass cliff: When leaning in is not enough," Bennett tells us:

On June 2, 2003, I was named editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer and became — as Jill Abramson did later at the New York Times — the first female editor in a storied institution’s hundred-year-plus history. In November 2006, I achieved another distinction that Abramson last week came to share. I was fired after a tenure of only about three years.

The difference in the public reaction to those events tells me something both wonderful and terrible about what has changed in the world that working women inhabit.

Terrible because, whatever the facts of Abramson’s departure, it exposed in a raw way the reservoirs of resentment, hurt and mistrust that women feel at work.

Wonderful, because it is clear that something fundamental has changed in just those seven short years. Women now feel not only resentful but also, finally, entitled: Entitled to lead. Entitled to be paid equally. Entitled to be flawed. Entitled to be fired, yes, but also entitled to point out the fact that to us seems so obvious: Men with even more spectacular and difficult flaws than ours get not only longer tenures but also much softer and more dignified landings.

Bennett makes clear: (a) that she's not writing from any inside knowledge of the Times situation, and (b) that her circumstances at the Inquirer were different from Abramson's at the Times:

I was never going to remain editor of the Inquirer after Knight Ridder, a legendary newspaper chain, sold the paper to a local business group headed by a PR guy. He told me quickly I would be replaced, but if I kept things running smoothly till he found a successor, he would make the transition easy.

A few weeks later, he informed me that my successor had been chosen and that, in two hours, it would be announced that I was being reassigned as a suburban columnist, an egregiously demeaning demotion. If I fought back, his chief lieutenant said, his boss would play hardball.

"Is it any wonder," Bennett asks, "that the narrative that sprang up after Abramson’s firing seemed so familiar to me?"

My path out was paved not with the face-saving transition that one saw for men removed from similar jobs at the Wall Street Journal or The Washington Post but rather with the marshaling of evidence that I had caused this demotion myself — that I had lost the support of my peers and of the newsroom reporting to me. The same hints that I was difficult to work with. Remote. Aloof. Disconnected. Did I have those flaws? I guess. Were they worse than the flaws of the men who preceded and succeeded me? I doubt it.

I did what most self-respecting female leaders do: I blamed myself. I did negotiate, but barely (I didn’t become a suburban columnist; I did get a modest severance) and backed out quietly with gentle words about my successor. The stories didn’t use the word “fired.” The support I got from other women was muted and behind the scenes.

What's more, Bennett says, the issue of gender-gap pay, which has become such a hot-button issue, in the Abramson-Times situation, resonates powerfully for her. "I have managed at five organizations over nearly 20 years," she writes. "At each of them I saw women paid less than men in what I thought were identical positions."

Was everyone lying who said they were committed to equal pay? I came to believe not. It was worse than that. It became clear that we saw things differently. I saw two people who, I believed, were doing the same work but being paid unequally. Those above me saw a story and a history, something that they thought caused the man to deserve higher pay: This one had just stepped down from a senior position and taken his higher pay with him. That one had been hired from a higher-paying organization. Yet another had been offered a job with a competitor. How many women in the past decade have been promoted past their peers, only to see in the spreadsheets the sad evidence that their own stories were apparently not as persuasive?

BENNETT ASKS, "SO WHAT CAUSED
THE DAM OF SILENCE TO BREAK?"

"Why," she continues, "are women so openly furious about something that we barely noticed in the past?"

In an update to my piece on the Abramson firing, I noted Ken Auletta's second helping of newyorker.com reporting. In that installment, in considering the different ways a man and a woman atop the NYT might be handled, Auletta raises the salutary case of A. M. Rosenthal, whose paranoid psychosis not only deformed the paper's vision of the world but terrorized the editorial staff during his time as top editor, from 1969 through 1987. If old Abe were to be described as merely "brusque" or "pushy," then Jill Abramson would have to be rated the the sunniest of Welcome Wagon hostesses.

Bennett suggests a couple of reasons for the very different reaction to Abramson's firing: "a growing body of women who are undeniably successful and not afraid to talk about their experiences as women" and "the equally growing body of women like me, with whom stories like Abramson’s resonate because of our own experiences."

And she concludes:

Whatever else happens as a result of Abramson’s firing, it has already begun the more difficult conversation about what we do when we lean in and it doesn’t work. This transparency will beget yet more transparency, which in turn will make it easier and less scary to look at the still difficult reality of female life at the top.

BUT LET'S KEEP OUR EYES ON THE PRIZE:
THIS ISN'T (JUST) A "WOMAN" STORY

A point we're hearing a lot (it was made by Slate's Emily Bazelon and Chris Hayes this evening on Chris's MSNBC show) is that the women at the NYT aren't in revolt. Which says to me that maybe the women at the NYT are also sidestepping the point. Or maybe they, unlike the rest of us, actually do know why Jill A was fired. The top editor of the NYT is automatically one of the most significant individuals in the world of daily news coverage, and it seems to me nuts that any further explanation is required for the outpouring of interest. Are the people who feel the need for more explanation out of their ever-lovin' minds?

And as long as we on the outside can't divine any better reasons than the possibilities in play -- the Pinch-didn't-like-her-anymore factor, her "brusqueness," her hiring a lawyer to press the issue of gender pay gap, her possible resistance to breaches in the paper's business-news wall -- -- then the paper deserves to be viewed with suspicion.

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