In her new book, “Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts,” Jill Abramson, the former executive editor of the Times, examines how four large American news organizations are surviving the age of the Internet and Donald Trump. Abramson’s accounts of Vice, BuzzFeed, the Washington Post, and the Times are filled with her own reporting and, in the case of the Times, her own experiences. Abramson, who became the paper’s first female executive editor, in 2011, was fired in 2014 for what she describes as a combination of reasons: her “less than stellar” management style, the “unfair double standard applied to many women leaders,” and her resistance to more communication between the business and editorial sides of the newspaper, which an internal “innovation report” had found was necessary to succeed in the digital age. “The fate of the republic seemed to depend more than ever on access to honest, reliable information,” she writes, of our current moment. “But every news company was turning itself upside down to produce and pay for it in the digital age. I determined to capture this moment of wrenching transition—and to do it as a reporter, my first calling.”
I spoke by phone with Abramson on Friday afternoon. During our conversation, which has been edited and condensed for clarity, we discussed whether the Times is chasing clicks with biased Trump coverage, Jeff Bezos’s ownership of the Washington Post, and the compromises that news organizations are forced to make to survive in 2019.
“I didn’t think technological change should sweep in moral change,” you write in the book, about your firing. At the beginning of 2019, has it?
Defining “moral” is somewhat difficult.
It’s your word. That’s why I chose it.
I know. It is my word and has everything to do with not putting somewhat misleading headlines to gain clickbait and scale audience, because that in turn brings advertising. I think that that is a kind of both journalistic and moral change that worries me. I don’t know. The way the news is presented, especially in headlines, is hyped for the same reasons—to track eyeballs and make money.
Over all, in journalism, let’s be frank—President Trump is like gold. People are reading all of these stories about him, even though in the Times and the Postand on the networks and certainly cable, except for Fox, the stories are tough and largely negative. But all of them get a ton of readership, and the ratings have been through the roof for cable. I think that, yes, Trump makes news all the time, but he also makes money for news organizations all the time. I guess the moral issue is: Are you running so much because each story is genuinely newsworthy or are you chasing audience?
When you said this [about moral change] in the book, you were actually referring to the events around your firing, in 2014. Is your biggest concern now about moral change in the news about how we respond to Trump?
It’s a concern. I wouldn’t say it’s the biggest one. A very big concern that is illustrated in the book is that things are going well right now for places like the New York Times, where digital subscriptions have greatly increased. But what worries me is that a lot of that is the Trump bump, and is that a sustainable business model for the future? A huge concern is that there still isn’t a business model that can work for local journalism, certainly.
You write in the book, “Given its mostly liberal audience, there was an implicit financial reward for the Times in running lots of Trump stories, almost all of them negative.” You later call the Times’ news pages “unmistakably anti-Trump.” Do you think the Times is running anti-Trump stories for the financial reward?
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