Abramson out as NYT editor, Baquet replaces her

If that was the goal, it wasn't met. And unless Sulzberger really is an idiot, which I doubt, he had to have known there was no way the paper could fire its first woman executive editor and have it be a peaceful (by which he means quiet) event.

 

Yeah, of course they do it all the time. But, Abramson wouldn't go along with it. She wouldn't resign (for family reasons), and she wouldn't show for Baquet's coronation.

She made Pinch fire her, and for that, Pinch thinks she's a bitch.

And, she wouldn't go quietly in the night, either. She got her version of events out to Auletta.

So, while Pinch didn't want to trash her, he had no choice. She made him trash her.

 

Strike me that there aren't really any winners in this. It's like neither side has anything redeemable.

 

In a time when most of the big newspaper families have sold out and gone off to sleep peacefully on piles of cash, it's amazing how much disdain the Sulzbergers attract. But unlike the Bancrofts or Grahams or the Chandlers, they're still there.

Sure, you can have issues with how they structure their stock or their decisions, but - God Bless Them - they still seem to regard the Times as an ongoing concern, worth plowing money into.

 

...Or at least as a sinecure for the various cousins and relatives (See! I can play that game too.)

 

Sulzberger has led the Times through an interesting era, he was trained in pre-Internet journalism when print was still huge and had to oversee the transition. Figure his son will be better versed in web journalism. It is the difference between learning a language and speaking it from birth.

 

It's not the language of web journalism publishers need to speak. They need to be fluent in making money off web journalism, a pretty much lost language at this point.

 

David Warsh, Politico Magazine:

The New York Times’ ‘Innovation Report’ Is a Disaster
Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr. would be a fool to follow his son’s advice.

For all the reporting about the unceremonious manner in which Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr. replaced executive editor Jill Abramson with Dean Baquet, the strongest evidence that the needle on his tenure as publisher of the New York Times has reached the danger zone is the company’s internal “Innovation Report” that someone at the New York Times Co. leaked last week, perhaps in hopes of offsetting the bad publicity.

Prepared by an eight-person newsroom team led by Sulzberger’s son, Arthur Gregg Sulzberger, the glossy, 96-page report is likely to have the opposite effect. It amounts to a clarion call to blow up the 163-year-old business in order to go into competition with the likes of BuzzFeed, Vox, Business Insider, the as-yet unformed First Look Media and the Huffington Post. And what a recipe for disaster that would be: abandoning the great news and insight that is at the heart of the Times brand to chase after audience in a game it can never hope to win.

Astoundingly, the report doesn’t so much as mention the Times’ much more menacing digital competitors, Bloomberg News and Reuters, breakthrough innovators whose news-gathering resources are far greater than those of the newspaper company. On every page, the “Innovation Report” betrays its authors’ failure to understand what the Times’ fundamental business is about.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/05/the-new-york-times-innovation-report-is-a-disaster-107041.html#ixzz32aoLKnQF

 

This ...

... is tremendous.

 

Boy. And after they searched the world, high and low, for the very best Sulzberger they could find to write such a grand plan.

 

Well, except for one thing. That's not at all what the report says. It actually says quite the opposite in regard to the future of Times journalism. What it does say is that the company should adopt the digital distribution tactics of some of some of the operations that have had success in audience development.

 

Maybe I should have just highlighted the part where it says to compete with BuzzFeed.