The New York Times announced yesterday that its executive editor, Jill Abramson, is leaving. She will be replaced by her managing editor, Dean Baquet. The publisher didn’t go into detail about the reasons for the change, saying that it was “an issue of newsroom management," but Ken Auletta reports at the New Yorker's blog that there's rumor that it may have had to do with Abramson's dissatisfaction over her pay and pension benefits, which were significantly lower than that of her predecessor, Bill Keller. Abramson, who was the first female executive editor of the paper, has been described—controversially—as difficult to work with. Last year, a POLITICO article quoted anonymous sources complaining about Abramson’s management style; one person called her “impossible.”
At the Nation, Scott Sherman examines the reasons for the beleaguered state of university presses.
Depressingly, readers of the Times spend as much time reading paid advertising as they do news stories.
A handful of news organizations and digital publications—including Vice, Mother Jones, Mashable, and Digg—have joined forces to report on Ukraine. So far, the cooperation consists of agreeing to use the hashtag #Ukrainedesk on all Ukraine stories.
The Observer identifies the 128 people in Brooklyn it considers most influential. On the literary front, the list namechecks Garth Risk Hallberg, who sold his debut novel to Knopf last year for nearly two million dollars, and Colson Whitehead, who’s apparently on the list because he lives in Brooklyn and is a “literary pillar,” whatever that means.
Sony Pictures has bought the film rights to No Place to Hide, Glenn Greenwald’s book about Edward Snowden.
