After leaving the Journal, Abramson ascended to the position of Washington bureau chief, overseeing a controversial period in the Times’ editorial history.
Abramson ran the paper’s Washington bureau from 2001 to 2003, a period that included the run-up to the Iraq war. During that time, the Times ran a series of stories, many authored by reporter Judith Miller, that supported the Bush administration’s contention that Iraq had pursued the development of weapons of mass destruction. That turned out to be false, and many of the stories that backed the White House’s line on WMDs came out of Abramson’s Washington bureau.
Abramson has not ducked responsibility for its coverage during that time. In a review of four books by Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward about the Bush administration, Abramson stepped back and admitted that she should have done more to push back against the Bush White House’s claims about Saddam Hussein’s pursuit of WMDs.
New York Times staff writer James Risen and Woodward had independently produced similar stories that cast doubt on Bush administration intelligence reports regarding Iraqi WMDs, but Abramson says she was not a sufficiently strong advocate for the story.
“I was Washington bureau chief for The Times while this was happening, and I failed to push hard enough for an almost identical, skeptical article, written by James Risen,” she wrote in September of 2008. “This was a period when there were too many credulous accounts of the administration’s claims about Iraq’s WMDs (including some published in The Times and The Post).”
In 2004, the Times published an extensive editor’s note describing how it had failed in its coverage during the lead up to the invasion of Iraq, but despite overseeing much of that coverage Abramson has continued to rise through the paper’s ranks.
Now, Abramson faces the challenge of fully implementing the paper’s digital strategy. The Times recently put in place a metered pay wall that gives readers access to 20 articles per month before requiring purchase of a paid subscription.
The system has been criticized for being easy to bypass, but early reports suggest that the Times may have found a model to generate significant revenue from its digital operations. Since launching in March, the paper has garnered 224,000 digital subscribers while at the same time maintaining a healthy 33 million unique visitors per month, which was in line with its pre-paywall volume.
In the second quarter of this year, the Times logged an operating loss of $114.1 million, but excluding the write down of a significant chunk of debt, the paper made a profit of about 14 cents per share, according to Forbes.
These results are encouraging for a paper that has gone through newsroom buyouts and layoffs but by no means implies that the paper has reached sound financial footing.
Additionally, the paper still has to transition fully from its print-centric heritage to a model that places the web at the forefront of its wide range of content. But preliminary signs indicate that Abramson may be the woman for the job.
Jen Preston, a social media repoter at the Times, tweeted, “For all of you wondering about Jill Abramson and the Web? Jill gets it. And she’s fearless. We’re lucky.”
Her editor from the American Lawyer agrees.
Brill said, “She is singularly equipped among the leading editors in the country to take the New York Times from the preeminent organization that chops down trees and delivers the news to your doorstep, to the leader that delivers the best news in whatever way you want it.”
—Staff writer Erika P. Pierson can be reached at epierson@fas.harvard.edu.
This story has been revised to reflect the following correction.
CORRECTION: SEP. 6, 2011
The Sep. 6 article "Jill Abramson Takes Top Post at New York Times" misidentified Jen Preston's position at the paper. She is currently a social media reporter and not the social media editor, though she formerly worked in the latter role.