Author: George Salamon

Much Ado or Too Much Ado About Jill Abramson

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Jill Abramson, executive editor of The New York Times since September 2011 and the first woman in that position, was fired by the paper’s publisher, Arthur Sulzberger Jr. on May 14. It was ugly. Some journalists referred to it as a defenestration. Ms. Abramson, in a commencement speech at Wake Forest University on May 19 called it “getting dumped.” It has created a huge buzz in the media. Within the first 24 hours after the event, not attended by Ms. Abramson, The Washington Post ran ten stories about it. Almost immediately columns appeared, telling readers what it “really” meant. As they say in New York City, Ms. Abramson’s home town, “Oh yeah?” Ms. Abramson charged that she was dumped so suddenly and unceremoniously because she complained about getting paid less than the male predecessors in her job. Mr. Sulzberger claimed she was let go because of her management style in the newsroom, a style described by adjectives like brusque, arbitrary, harsh, non-collaborative and despotic.

Let us now praise our paper of record: The New York Times confronts America’s unpleasant facts

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By now the effects of what those numbers don’t reveal are felt in the bones and marrow of those suffering from the effects. And in four articles between April 21 and May 10, all on page 1, the Times painted vivid portraits of hardship and hopelessness now rampant from the dirt poor in West Virginia to the once comfortable middle class in California. The first piece, “50 Years Later, Hardship Hits Back. Poorest Counties Are Still Losing in War on Want,” (April 21) describes life in McDowell County, West Virginia, the poorest county in the state, “emblematic of entrenched American poverty for more than half a century.” After President John F. Kennedy visited this county, he established the federal food stamp program with his first executive order. And it was the squalor in this county and in others in Appalachia that President Lyndon B. Johnson had in mind for the battleground of his “war on poverty.”

On the passing of Michael Janeway (1940-2014)

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He was a gentleman and a scholar. And a journalist. Michael Janeway (73), former editor of the Boston Globe, executive editor of the Atlantic Monthly, professor and dean at two of America’s leading schools of journalism and author of “The Fall of the House of Roosevelt” (2004), died on April 17. The rambling obituary in…

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Journalistic naval-gazing: 2 heavyweights have their say

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BY GEORGE SALAMON / Earlier this month, two heavyweights of journalism wrote about their profession. On March 14, Glenn Greenwald – who revealed much of Edward Snowden’s National Security Agency leaks in the UK’s Guardian – answered an attack on his new publication, the Intercept, which is funded by billionaire Pierre Omidyar, founder and chief executive officer of eBay. Journalism, Greenwald told us in “On the Meaning of Journalistic Independence,” does not have to reflect the views of those who fund it, even those with “bad political views.” A few days earlier, the New York Times’ public editor, Margaret Sullivan, reflected on the values of good journalism, based on her talk earlier to the Associated Collegiate Press convention.