As with any such upheaval, there\u2019s a history behind it. Several weeks ago, I\u2019m told, Abramson discovered that her pay and her pension benefits as both executive editor and, before that, as managing editor were considerably less than the pay and pension benefits of Bill Keller, the male editor whom she replaced in both jobs. \u201cShe confronted the top brass,\u201d one close associate said, and this may have fed into the management\u2019s narrative that she was \u201cpushy,\u201d a characterization that, for many, has an inescapably gendered aspect. Sulzberger is known to believe that the Times, as a financially beleaguered newspaper, needed to retreat on some of its generous pay and pension benefits; Abramson, who spent much of her career at the Wall Street Journal, had been at the Times for far fewer years than Keller, which accounted for some of the pension disparity. Eileen Murphy, a spokeswoman for the Times, said that Jill Abramson\u2019s total compensation as executive editor \u201cwas directly comparable to Bill Keller\u2019s\u201d\u2014though it was not actually the same. I was also told by another friend of Abramson\u2019s that the pay gap with Keller was only closed after she complained. But, to women at an institution that was once sued by its female employees for discriminatory practices, the question brings up ugly memories. Whether Abramson was right or wrong, both sides were left unhappy. A third associate told me, \u201cShe found out that a former deputy managing editor\u201d\u2014a man\u2014\u201cmade more money than she did\u201d while she was managing editor. \u201cShe had a lawyer make polite inquiries about the pay and pension disparities, which set them off.\u201d<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\nOf course, Abramson was good for business, and the paper is “financially beleagered” Sulzberger decided to build a palatial new headquarters for the paper, and use very short term debt to finance this, which required a refinance at junk bond rates from Mexican crony capitalist Carlos Slim, and a sale-leaseback of $\u00be million square feet in their headquarters.<\/p>\n
Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. is letting his sense of entitlement show.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It was announced today that the New York Times fired Jill Abramson as executive editor. It appears that this was largely because she complained when she discovered that her pay was significantly less than her predecessor, as well as one of her (male) subordinates: As with any such upheaval, there\u2019s a history behind it. Several …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[971,975,1129,1064],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-186093","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-civil-rights","category-employment","category-journalism","category-media"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186093"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=186093"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186093\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=186093"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=186093"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=186093"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}