Difficult News

Lessons in journalism—and business—from editing the New York Times during the great digital disruption.

- Jill Abramson

WHEN I TOOK the reins of the New York Times in 2011, it was during a period of convulsive change and financial struggle, when the pace of the great digital disruption had intensified after the introduction of the iPhone and Facebook’s News Feed. The decade that followed, which culminated in Donald Trump’s election, transformed everything about how the news was reported and delivered. On their smartphones, people expected news to be instantaneous, even if the stories were erroneous. The old business model—advertising and circulation—was shattered by the new mantra that news had to be free. News was global, and could be manipulated by foreign powers, as the world learned in the 2016 election.

As executive editor of the Times, I had the best ringside seat to the digital transformation of what I still consider to be the one indispensable news organization in the world. People desperately need reliable information for democracy to survive, but there seemed to be no reliable business model to sustain it. Legacy newspapers like the Times and the Washington Post were struggling to become digital first and to find new revenue. That meant hammering holes in the wall that long separated news and business. Meanwhile, new players like Buzz Feed and Vice were building huge audiences on social platforms like Facebook and YouTube. With valuations in the billions, they looked to be the digital winners. During my tenure, change was the only certainty.

The conclusion of a much-discussed Innovation Report written by Arthur Gregg Sulzberger, the Times’ current publisher, was that the Times wasn’t changing fast enough. At almost the same moment in 2014, I was fired and lost my place as an eyewitness.