From our studios in new york city, this is charlie rose. The New York Times announced that the editor Jill Abramson would be replaced. She was fired. In an email, they said the departure was related to an issue with management in the newsroom. Jill abramson while they are not talking to the press both have a peer to on program in previous years. She told me about her interview for her position with the publisher. I was nervous. He took me to a very nice restaurant. I picked at my food. What did he want to know . He wanted to know first of all things about what my vision of where the news report needed to go and he wanted to discuss both some of my strengths and some weaknesses. An appraisal of drinks and weaknesses. Both strength and weaknesses. I thought that was fair. What did he say . When i am in a bad mood i can be too brusque with people and you can read it on my face that there is like good jill who is still at it and engaged in wants to talk about a great story and who compliments reporters, that is good jill. And bad jill can interact and be bad. Interrupt him to be bad. She has to work on listening. She does. She told me what distinguishes the New York Times is good journalism. This is what distinguishes the times as quality journalism. We do it in the print as print journalism and digitally by the hour. We deepen stories by ringing bringing readers into the conversation. In enliven the story and add new dimensions to it. I have been very am invested in our digital work. We used to talk at the times, even arthur would use the phrase we have to be ready for our digital future. It is not the digital future. It is a digital present. Digital prison. We have a newspaper that is treasured by hundreds of thousands of readers. We have more people who home subscribe to the New York Times in print now than we did. We have a very dedicated core of people who enjoy the news report most in print. We are going to keep delivering it that way to them. They love that. And here is the publisher in 2005 on the importance of choosing the right leadership for his paper. What i think is critical for me to say is that it is my job more than anything, it is my job to ensure that when the time comes for the next generation of leaders to take over the news company that they are headed candid as strong and powerful and institution as i did in my time. He is the first African American editor. Tracking the story from the beginning. Why are we so fascinated, people in the media like you and i obviously observed by it but it seems to be the talk everywhere. The new yorker got one million hits which is extraordinary. Just for the first one i did. It suggests to me as does my email and my phone calls the tremendous amount of interest in this and some of it i think is women. The sense that the first female editor, why was she fired and is it true that her compensation, her pay was less than her male the person she succeeded was male. One of the crucial issues, i want to set that aside first. Staying with the Management Issues. That is it. The pay issue feeds into a larger context of management. What was the management issue, that seems so severe that the publisher did not think he could work it out or make it palpable. Do not forget Arthur Sulzberger, jr. Appointed hal raines. They won multiple pulitzer prizes. He was one of the greatest editors but he had a very difficult management style. He was a brusque and he was brutal brusque and he was brutal. Arthur had to fire him. When he debated whether to make Jill Abramson the next editor, the debate was he worried that Jill Abramson was too much like hal in some ways, she was too rough. Not as rough as hal. She had a brusque reputation. He worried about that. He decided that she had the experience, she was tough and she had the digital experience that kay lacked and he chose her. They had a Good Relationship for a period of time. They heard feedback that she was brusque with people in the newsroom and some tension existed. Because of . All kinds of things. She was very wary of the new Ceo Mark Thompson coming into the newsroom. You had a high wall between the news side and the business side. The job was to fix digital. And to figure out new ways of generating revenue. All newspapers are in trouble. The business side once those walls lowered was to figure out some ways to make more money. A traditional journalist and Jill Abramson is a good journalist worries. Something called native advertising comes to the fore. Which the times embraces. It is saying to corporations, we will camouflage your ads to make them look like new stories. News stories. There are other online news publications that do the same thing. If you are Jill Abramson you are asking questions of Mark Thompson on the business side. Dont you see that our circulation is going down and our advertising is going down and that creates the tension. On top of that, Jill Abramson discovered several weeks ago that her pay is less than the person she succeeded, bill keller. How did she discover this . I know but i cannot say. I would betray a source but she finds out and she finds out that she is getting paid less. When bill keller hers was 559 thousand. She goes to the publisher and Mark Thompson and complaints and she finds out, same source, that her pay when she was managing it was less than the male that was the managing editor. When she was Washington Bureau chief her pay was lower. Is there any explanation, the salary was less. There are always explanations. Phil used to be on the Editorial Board and had a higher rate of pay so he was making more money. The salary carried over. There is not a good explanation for why the salary you would think that they would say we cannot afford to pay any salary to a woman as editor that is less than a man. But then what happens, heres where the complications begin. The times says when you compare salary, you have to look at total compensation. Arthur put out a statement the next day saying that total compensation was roughly comparable. They did not answer the question about the managing editor, by the way. And how is that . They say it is because you have to look at the bonuses and the Stock Options and any other longterm payments. But they did agree to bump up her 503,000 to 525,000 after she protested. She didnt she hired a lawyer to talk to them and work this out in the saw this as a warlike action. A declaration of war. That became jill is too difficult to work with. That fit that storyline that was developing. It brought it to another thing happened. They all agreed that they should hire a digital managing editor to be the counterpart. Who is they . Not just jill labor and some abramson and Mark Thompson. What happened was they arranged Janine Gibson to come in a week ago last monday to meet with arthur and thompson and the go to lunch. They were trying to recruit her. She did not tell dean she was recruiting to be a managing editor but doing digital. He was really upset. So he happened to have a dinner with Arthur Sulzberger is the following wednesday, tuesday two days later. And at dinner, dean did something very uncharacteristic. He is very gentle and a popular figure and a good journalist. He said it is unacceptable that this happened this way and the fact that jill is very difficult to work with, i find. Arthur was confronted with the question, this fit into that sense that jill was too difficult and it was not a team that he felt calm but with. On friday, he asked jill to his office and fired her. He said would you like to announce your resigning . We are going to tell the truth. Can i add one more thing about the pay which i think is important . It doesnt matter whether you double over how many dollars quibble over how many difference there wasnt pay it dollars even if you assume that they were right that the total compensation was comparable, the fact that the first female editor believed it was not comparable, believed that she was not getting paid equally for equal work is something the times not to address. And that is an issue that led her to hire a lawyer. Do you think the publisher thought that he should not pay her as much for the same job because of some because of gender . I do not believe that her one minute. What was in his mind . Because of the economy and the decline of the newspapers we have to reduce the salary. It could be that they are justifying that keller had in at the times for a longer period. They are saying they made it equal. On the other hand if they said they made it equal, why did they agree after she protested to raise her pay . Mark thompson had said, we want to keep you here forever. This is on april 28 and an email which i published to her in which he said she was talking about jenin abram to janine trying to recruit her. And about jill as you point out. What he said in the email was jenin adores you, she respects you. The way that to close the deal and get her here is to reassure her that you will stay for a long period of time as the editor which i hope you will do. 10 days later she is fired. Do you think they will be affected by this in the following way, she was a magnet for young women who are reporters. Foreign, domestic, business, science, politics. Will that change . I do not know. I know that one of the things that dean and arthur did yesterday was gore around and go around and meet with women to assure them. He is great at that. Normally when an editor is replaced, people are full of anxiety. What about my job, etc. , who will come in . When they look at dean they are comfortable. I wondered if the president of the United States did not know that he had david traced to David Petraeus to go over there, would this have happened if the publisher did not know that he had dean to go to . That is an important point. Clearly he did. That was he knew that would be, so things down. What are you looking for, where is your reporters i eye searching . One is what impact will this have . In the Business World they talk about the brand. What does the times stand for and the fear is that this will harm the brand. Maybe they will lose some women. It is important not to be unfair. Arthur sulzberger who you can fault for the the way he has run the business side of the paper, it is not in great business shape. Journalistically it is in very good shape. That is part of his responsibility, too. He chose the first female editor. The notion that he somehow is sexist is kind of preposterous. Thank you. My pleasure. We now continue our conversation about leadership at the New York Times. Joining me from massachusetts, my guest is the former editor of the Chicago Tribune. From washington, dylan byers and rebecca traister. Tell me the issues in this much discussed firing. It is a sign of issues around jill and what happened and that has been much discussed in much and much reported and probably much more to come. I think for me and for many of the people i have been speaking with and hearing from in the last several days, there is this looming question about where women stand in this industry. When i became editor of the Chicago Tribune in 2001, there were quite a number of us and the growing number of us who were holding the seniormost leadership positions in newsrooms. We used to have a dinner once a year and we could fill a dinner table of those of us who were doing this work and were now with jills dismissal we have no women leading any newspapers in the top 10 markets and in the top 25, we have only two. I think this question of whither women in journalism is a story of a lot of regression in recent years. I do think that we placed a demands on women in these roles that we may not even be consciously aware of but this balance to be coming you need to be assertive but not aggressive, you need to be strong but not too strong, you need to be human but not motherly, and i think that is a really tough balance and when someone does not play that kind of preprescribed role and is seen as some of the language we are hearing, abrasive, bossi, i think it creates a challenge for that woman to succeed. That is an issue into itself. Unto itself. If a man do you think Arthur Sulzberger would not have fired a man in the same circumstances based on what appeared to be the Management Issues . I have a lot of respect for arthur and he runs a very accomplished company. The work that they do is extraordinary and he deserves some credit for that. Whether or not he would have done Something Different in the case of a male editor, i have no insight into that. I do think that if you look at just apart from jills case, any of these cases with women succeeding in their jobs and somehow failing, you do have to ask questions about, was there mentoring, was their support, was there guidance when they were fishers or fault lines that were identified in someones performance and i think that is a question for the times as it has been for any of these women. I had that at the tribune. I was extraordinarily fortunate. Theres not a lot of training for these jobs. It is certified the job training. Sort of onthejob training. You are appointed editor and you are responsible for this massive institution and if you do not have the scaffolding, the kind of human scaffolding in place at the highest echelons of the company, it will be much harder to succeed. Obviously we do not know yet all of the various Management Issues that will be reported eventually within the next few days. And all of the specifics about why Arthur Sulzberger decided to fire Jill Abramson but if were talking about the way her manner was hair dries, in the press and by sources who spoke to dylan byers in the story, she has been characterized as being brusque, short tempered, scolding staff, very short with the photo editor was that was in dylans in my 13. Why are you still in this meeting, go fix the photo. There is a long and storied history of executive editors, editors, editors everywhere, bosses everywhere in highpowered positions being ill tempered, staff having complaints about their management style. Howell raines was a famously terrible, abrasive manager who employees said rule the newsroom by fear. It probably contributed to his downfall. It did. What did him and was a very specific error and scandal and that he was publishing reporting that it turned out had been fabricated by his reporter. This had nothing to do with jills journalism. Apparently. In not offering the specifics, if he had provided a rundown of the reasons that he fired Jill Abramson we might have a clearer version. We knew with raines, he exhibited many of the same qualities that have been reported about abramson. The newsroom did not like him. He had lost the newsroom. Abramson herself may have had to do the optics, she may have chosen not to be there. It has been reported that she chose to be fired rather than resign. And yet Arthur Sulzbergers sendoff to her had no acknowledgment of her accomplishments as an editor. Whether was diversifying the masthead or for individual achievements, the snowfall story that got so much attention and prizes, the series about the homeless adolescent. There was no rundown of her occult bushmens or her accomplishments or acknowledgment of her historic role and it is sent out. In terms of how we talk about management styles, she and raines are comparable. The reason gender comes into it is we are accustomed to the idea of men in power being unpleasant in many ways. It does not mean we like them or liked working for them. We may think theyre terrible managers but it does not strike us as inherently, as a reason to disqualify them from their powerful position. Our ears are not tuned to women exhibiting the same kinds of professional power and attitudes. And so that strikes people who work for them, people who are their bosses, people who read about them, it hits a strong. Hits us wrong. All of us. Woman, men, their subordinates, their superiors. We are not used to those attitudes and that kind of voice coming from a woman so we respond to it differently. I was to that last point i think there are always questions to be raised about differences in how we treat women in power versus minimum power. Versus men in power. Certainly there is a different attitude towards a woman if she is brusque and a man if he is brusque. Those have been well documented or explored over the last 48 hours. I would say that there are things that happened behindthescenes the scenes that we know about from our reporting and they do not amount to overseeing a jayson blairlike scenario which a fireable offense. There are larger scenes than just someone who is colder difficult to do with. She didnt make moves to hire a comanaging editor without telling her current managing editor. She hired a lawyer to address her concerns about her salary. That was viewed as a combative move by the publisher, Arthur Sulzberger. I do think that the question of sexism is a fair one to explore. I would add that it is not simply due to her attitude in pageone meetings. Would this have happened if there was no someone as strong, prepared to take over, who clearly had himself some conflict with jill according to what we read and someone that the paper valued as a future editor and probably jill thought of as a future editorinchief. Certainly. Having dean who is executive editor in that position created some new pressures. He was trying to be coached by poached by other News Organizations and that might have played in to this as well. What we know is that Jill Abramson did not have a great relationship with our thistles relationship with sulzberger. There are areas where they butted heads as well. Wh