The Liu Institute for Global Issues hosted another talk as part of the Lind Initiative that packed the room last Friday. This time the speaker was Jill Abramson.
Abramson worked for the Harvard Independent as an undergraduate, then went on to top level positions in the world of journalism, such as bureau chief of the Wall Street Journal and executive editor of the New York Times.
Abramson came to UBC upon a request to talk about gender and inequality as a social problem and UBC showed up to listen.
“When I was starting out in the profession, there were few women investigative reporters. There weren’t many women at all covering the core beats like the White House or the economy,” said Abramson, in an interview with The Ubyssey. “Now you don’t see it as unusual a thing as it was. But the hierarchy of how news organizations are run is still pretty male dominated.”
Abramson was the first female executive editor of the New York Times, a position from which she was fired just over three years into the job.
According to a report by the Times this year, gender imbalance is indeed still at play in the media industry. Men dominate political coverage, science stories and criminal justice news — areas usually termed as hard news.
Although Abramson noted that the role of women in media hasn’t been changing as rapidly as one would expect, it has changed in some ways. Moreover, she herself has been lucky with the female figures in her life.
“The first boss that I had in journalism — which was still when I was in college — was the Boston bureau chief of Time Magazine and she was a woman,” said Abramson. “She just was very encouraging of me and showed a lot of interest in me when I was young ... I tried to be conscious when I became a senior editor at the Times of paying attention to young talented women.”
The advice Abramson offered for young journalists entering the industry today — whether male or female — is “to have endless curiosity and a great nose for a good story and to go.” She continued, “I think that too much journalism is being done on long tables by young people who are just aggregating things that are already on the internet.”
The role the internet has played in reshaping the landscape of the journalism industry is a ubiquitous topic. Abramson’s even rumoured to have signed a million dollar book deal that will focus on news media in the digital age.
Abramson said one of the downsides she sees is that investigative journalism has less of a role to play in an age where news is expected to be delivered instantaneously. Since investigative journalism takes a long time, it is expensive and is a model that some outlets may not be able to sustain long-term.
Nonetheless, she is “optimistic that there’s actually more good journalism being done right now than before if you look across the board that places that weren’t traditionally known for quality news.”
Despite being in a tough industry, Abramson encourages all young writers to look for the story in everything.