Jill Abramson on media layoffs: 'The villains are Facebook and Google'

Merchants of Truth, the new book by the former New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson, is a deep dive into multiple crises that have bedeviled both legacy and new media companies.

One of those crises is, in a word, Donald Trump, specifically his assault on media and the fact-based world – so perhaps it was inevitable that the president himself would misrepresent her 400-plus page tome in a tweet.

“Ms. Abramson is 100% correct. Horrible and totally dishonest reporting on almost everything they write,” he wrote about the New York Times.

Abramson’s answer was swift.

“Anyone who reads my book, Merchants of Truth, will find I revere @nytimes and praise its tough coverage of you,” she replied to Trump.

If anything, the book’s most salient takeaways on the matter are that the Times overemphasized Hillary Clinton’s emails and failed to move forward a critical investigation of her opponent. Though she also takes issue with the Times’ tone, describing certain headlines and language as “anti-Trump”.

Nuanced criticism of media is fraught in the era of Trump, who will take any opening to mock the “failing New York Times”, as he likes to call it. But the Times is currently thriving, thanks mostly – and perhaps ironically – to Trump.

That wasn’t true in the years leading up to 2011, when Abramson took the helm as its first female editor. Newspaper families, from Knight Ridder to Dow Jones, were calling it quits, and the Times’ paywall blocking access to popular columnists had been an embarrassing flop. Nor had things stabilized in 2014 when, in the wake of her controversial firing, she set out in search of answers in the industry-wide quest for models of sustainable digital news.

“At end of 2014, BuzzFeed and Vice were both envied by legacy companies – the shiny new stars that had just gotten recently into news,” Abramson tells me.

At first, it seemed internet natives like BuzzFeed were ahead of the game. But Trump’s election and the attendant swell in subscribers at legacy outlets has turned the tables on that: at the turn of the millennium, Times subscriptions accounted for just 26% of total revenue; in August they accounted for nearly two-thirds of total revenue.

“The key to being a good reporter is always being willing to be surprised when you’re reporting a story,” Abramson says with a laugh. “I was.”

She meant surprised by the evolving story arc, but she’s a damn good reporter too.

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Before becoming executive editor of the Times in 2011, Abramson was an investigative reporter covering the Clinton White House for the Wall Street Journal. And after supreme court justice Clarence Thomas was confirmed in 1991, she spent three years looking into sexual harassment allegations brought by Anita Hill, exposing the sexist inner workings of the Senate judiciary in an award-winning book co-written with the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer.

As a columnist at the Guardian, Abramson has also been a colleague of mine. When I met her while covering the Democratic national convention in 2016, I found her an intimidating presence to sit across from over lunch. By now, she’s probably used to being seen that way. One colleague once memorably described her as having “balls like cast-iron cantaloupes” – a good makeup for investigative reporting but it sometimes got her in trouble in her years as top editor at the Times.

A dogged defender of the separation of business and editorial – “church and state”, as she refers to them in the book – the paper’s perilous financial straits did little to soften her disposition.

When, for instance, at a lunch with top executives the paper’s CEO, Mark Thompson, said he expected the newsroom to help generate ideas for revenue-increasing products, Abramson wasn’t having it. “If that’s what you expect, you have the wrong executive editor,” she snapped.

A shocked silence followed and the waiter spilled the water he was pouring.

The retort “had flown out of my mouth before I could edit either its substance or its tone”, Abramson wrote in what, in retrospect, reads like an epitaph for her time at the Times, a moment that was the beginning of the end.

But even where she was unwilling to compromise, she understood the depth of the financial threat. The trouble was, no one had the solution (even when many thought they did).

At the time, BuzzFeed and Vice were being hailed as new-media heroes and legacy outlets sought to imitate them, with forays into native and branded advertising. “It was a response to real stresses in the business models that support all of these news organizations,” Abramson says of the pivots that chafed her. “They are all doing things that were not done until the very end of my time at the Times.” (The newspaper, Abramson notes in her book, “strongly disagrees” with her view that business considerations have had too much influence on news coverage.)

That Abramson is still working through her experience as a central player in a pivotal moment of news history is apparent in her writing on the Times. It’s also where her insights are most powerful. But her criticisms of digital media companies and their discontents are sometimes misplaced where they land on individual young staffers, some of whom, like VICE’s Arielle Duhaime-Ross, have said they were inaccurately represented. (Abramson addressed some of those claims, dismissively, in an interview with the New Yorker.)

Nevertheless, in the five years since Abramson left the paper, a strange thing has begun to happen: the newcomers look increasingly like legacy outlets, even as legacy outlets mimicked them.

They got interested in political scoops, started hiring top talent and forming investigative teams. They also started producing first-rate journalism, including BuzzFeed’s groundbreaking coverage of fake news around the 2016 election, and Vice’s footage of white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia.

But the newcomers had also begun to develop legacy media’s money problems, as the platforms they built themselves atop tightened their grip over revenue.

BuzzFeed built itself on the back of Facebook and its social sharing mechanisms, while Vice built itself on YouTube, owned by Google. But in recent years virtually all digital advertising has gone to profit Facebook and Google, while media companies fight for scraps.

In her book, Abramson has tough words for just about everyone, herself included. But she saves the worst for the increasingly monopolistic companies many news outlets have come to depend upon. “I really do think the villains are Facebook and Google,” she says.

Changes to their algorithms, or a faddish emphasis on video, can spell financial calamity for outlets big and small. Last month, Abramson declared it “winter” for digital media after HuffPost announced a new round of terminations and BuzzFeed called for the elimination of 15% of staff. On 1 February, Vice axed 250 staffers.

“It’s live by it and die by it, I fear,” Abramson says of using social media as your business model. “You know,” she adds quickly, “I hope none of these companies die.”

Still she doesn’t think financial salvation is around the bend. In January, as an already beleaguered news industry suffered the loss of an additional 1,000 jobs nationally, Facebook announced the opening of its strongest year ever. Overall newsroom employment is down nearly a quarter in less than 10 years, according to a July report from the Pew Research Center.

The most promising business trend to emerge is a growth in reader revenue, which has been a boon to the Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian, ProPublica and others. But only a handful of news brands have been able to make it work.

Local and regional news organizations have been decimated in recent years, a reality Abramson sees as one of the central tragedies in journalism. Even if they could attract more reader revenue now, after rounds of being soldoff and stripped down for parts, few have the bones left to compete.

In that light, perhaps, Abramson’s formerly inconvenient commitment to old-school journalistic principles seems salient: there is currently no greater moneymaker than the strength of a paper’s storytelling.

Top papers know as much now: the Washington Post changed its tagline to “Democracy dies in darkness”. And whereas the New York Times’ publisher, Arthur Sulzberger Jr, had briefly weighed selling off even the paper’s defining motto, “All the news that’s fit to print”, for ad space, now the paper brands itself as the Trump era’s ultimate purveyor of truth.

In her book, Abramson praised the Times’ truth brand campaign, which debuted in 2017 and has helped drive digital subscriptions. “The slogan signaled a determination to hold Trump accountable,” she wrote. “The news report as a whole had never been stronger.”

Abramson’s book is perhaps at its best as a transparency check on her former employer. At a time when many are asking how and why the country’s top journalistic outlet gravely mishandled a critical investigation into Trump’s Russia ties, for instance, Abramson is quite possibly the most informed person free to speak her mind.

As disturbing as it was to learn of the public editor’s internal review finding that the paper could have published sooner and stronger on Trump’s links with Russia was, an email Abramson details from top editor Dean Baquet – in which he appears angry his reporters spoke candidly about the paper’s mistakes – is at least as troubling.

Detractors would paint Abramson as a dinosaur at the end of its era, but from the vantage point of 2019, it seems Abramson saw the future best: that the Times and other top papers would survive not by the grace of creative concessions in advertising, but on the value of their news report.

This moment also offers validation of a notion she’s long seemed to possess: the idea that human beings are smart and complicated, that you can’t hack them with formulas.

“The truth is there isn’t one business model that’s going to save journalism. Great journalism is going to save journalism,” she says. Then she makes her excuses, and puts down the phone.