Jill Abramson might be spending Thursday looking for a good tattoo removal service.
The 60-year-old journalist, ousted as executive editor at The New York Times on Wednesday after leading the paper for 867 days, reportedly got inked some years ago with a Times-stylized “T” on her back — a proud mark to reflect her success at the paper she joined as an investigative reporter in 1997.
But that was before she was unceremoniously dumped — after an internal report one week ago on the paper’s digital transformation said it was not moving fast enough.
Her support in the newsroom also seemed to be waning over the past year following a string of high-level departures that included Brian Stelter, for CNN; Jeff Zeleny, to ABC News; Deputy Editor Megan Liberman, tech columnist David Pogue and political writer Matt Bai, all to Yahoo! News; and Pulitzer Prize-winner Don Van Natta Jr. and data geek Nate Silver, who gained kudos for accurately predicting the presidential race in 2012.
Politico.com Web site delivered a devastating report in April 2013 on discord within the newsroom. Abramson later admitted that the blistering account brought her to tears.
“She was not enough of a digital pioneer for [Publisher Arthur Sulzberger’s] taste,” said one former colleague who counted himself as an Abramson friend.
But even he acknowledged her replacement, Dean Baquet, has a lot more support in the newsroom.