On November 4, 2011 the International Festival of Arts and Ideas honored New York Times Executive Editor Jill Abramson with its 2nd annual Visionary Leadership Award. At the award luncheon, Abramson was interviewed by fellow journalist Linda Greenhouse in this insightful conversation about their role as journalists and the changing face of contemporary journalism.
Jill Abramson has been the Executive Editor of The New York Times since September 2011, and is the Times first female executive editor. Previously, she was managing editor of the paper from August 2003 until August 2011. As managing editor, Ms. Abramson has helped supervise coverage of two wars, four national elections, hurricanes and oil spills. She also writes about politics, in the Week in Review and Book Review sections. She served as Washington bureau chief from December 2000 until July 2003. She joined the newspaper in September 1997 and became Washington editor in 1999. Previously, Ms. Abramson worked at The Wall Street Journal from 1988 to 1997. While there, she served as deputy bureau chief in its Washington, D.C., bureau and investigative reporter, covering money and politics. From 1986 to 1988 she was editor in chief of Legal Times, a weekly newspaper in Washington, D.C. Before joining Legal Times, Ms. Abramson was a senior staff reporter for The American Lawyer for nearly a decade. While an undergraduate at Harvard, she worked at Time magazine from 1973 to 1976. Ms. Abramson is co-author of Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas, published in 1994, and Where They Are Now: The Story of the Women of Harvard Law 1974, published in 1986. Strange Justice, a non-fiction finalist for the National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award in 1994, details the circumstances surrounding the confirmation hearings of Justice Clarence Thomas. Where They Are Now is a study of the 71 women in the Harvard Law School class of 1974.
Linda Greenhouse is an award-winning journalist with a distinguished, 40-year career at The New York Times, including 30 years covering the United States Supreme Court. After retiring in 2009, she became the Joseph Goldstein Lecturer in Law and Knight Distinguished Journalist-in-Residence at Yale Law School. She is a member of the faculty of the Supreme Court Advocacy Clinic and teaches other Supreme Court-related courses. She has received numerous journalism awards for her reporting, including a Pulitzer Prize in 1998 (beat reporting); the Carey McWilliams Award from the American Political Science Association in 2002 for ?a major journalistic contribution to our understanding of politics?; and the Goldsmith Career Award for Excellence in Journalism from Harvard University?s Kennedy School in 2004.