The New York Times lost another high-profile columnist Monday after tech and gadgets guru David Pogue stunned the Gray Lady by announcing he was jumping to Yahoo!
Pogue will start a new consumer tech site at the Web portal, which CEO Marissa Mayer is trying to revive.
He is the second high-profile columnist Times executive editor Jill Abramson has lost in three months.
Nate Silver, the superstar statistical columnist and the founder of the FiveThirtyEight blog — who astoundingly called 50 out of 50 states in the 2012 presidential election — announced earlier this year he was leaving for Disney’s ESPN.
Times Business Editor Dean Murphy said there are no bad feelings regarding Pogue’s departure.
“We loved him, he did really great work for 13 years ,and we really wish him well in what he does next,” Murphy said.
But one Times observer observed, “It does beg the question: Is the Times in a position to keep the stars it creates?”
The departures of Pogue and Silver underscore larger problems for Abramson, sources said. She recently passed the two-year anniversary of her appointment as the first woman editor in the paper’s history.
While the paper has won some Pulitzer Prizes during her tenure, there is plenty of grumbling in the ranks.
“There is no question it has a serious morale problem,” an insider said.
The tension in the ranks seems to come from two fronts: The traditional Washington, DC-versus-New York power struggle is now compounded by the tug between legacy media and the digital world.
In September, Abramson pulled the national editor, Sam Sifton, from his job and put him in charge of a yet to be unveiled “immersive digital news magazine” and a new “dining news product.”
As well-liked as Sifton was at the paper, most said the assignment was a recognition that she had made the wrong choice for national editor.
Abramson is all about the “brand New York Times” said one former staffer. “But these columnists are really brands unto themselves.”
Pogue’s way out the door was probably paved by the defection from the Times in September of Megan Liberman, who was the deputy news editor responsible for much of its blog network.
She jumped to be editor-in-chief of Yahoo! in September.
“It’s not a question of keeping their stars,” said one former editor. “What’s new is that they aren’t replenishing their ranks fast enough or attracting top talent in the way they could in the past.”