Just who is the other woman in the New York Times’ firing of Executive Editor Jill Abramson?
Janine Gibson is editor of the Guardian US, and according to an e-mail from Times CEO Mark Thompson to Abramson three weeks ago, she was thought to be the latter’s successor down the road.
Both Thompson and Abramson were wooing Gibson to take a managing editor position and become an equal with Dean Baquet.
Gibson, 41, is the editor who fired up a team of journalists that landed a Pulitzer Prize for public service earlier this year for the paper’s work on the massive phone-snooping scandal revealed by Edward Snowden.
As the Guardian’s top editor, Alan Rusbridger, said at a dinner thrown by the graduate school of journalism at City University of New York, “We have the Magna Carta. You have the First Amendment,” referencing why the Guardian published the Snowden story here.
The dinner featured Arthur “Pinch” Sulzberger and Baquet, the soon-to-be top editor, but not Abramson, who had already become a dead woman walking.
Baquet was said to be infuriated that he was never consulted that Gibson was going to be brought aboard as a co-No. 2 — effectively making her an equal with Baquet. He voiced his displeasure in a May 7 dinner with Sulzberger, according to a posting by the New Yorker’s Ken Auletta.
Two days later, on Friday, May 9, Sulzberger told Abramson she was going to be removed.
But Gibson, whose prospective arrival created such internal angst, turned down the offer and instead said she is going to return to London as deputy editor, in charge of the Guardian’s booming Web operation.