Last Tuesday morning, two brilliant female journalists commanded two of the world's greatest newspapers. By Wednesday evening, they were both history. Natalie Nougayrede, overthrown by a senior staff revolt, left the editor's chair at Le Monde. And Jill Abramson, executive editor of The New York Times, was quickly shoved out, too — sacked, brushed away, her name erased from the paper's masthead with a ruthlessness Kim Jong Il might have envied.
What on earth went wrong so brutally swiftly? French anarchy as usual did for Nougayrede after a mere 14 months at the top. Le Monde, although the journalists don't control its ownership any longer, still basically allows the editorial team to select (and thus, in logic, effectively deselect) an editor. Nougayrede wanted to change a lot of things on the design and digital front. But no dice, and no agreement. Staff moaned about her "Putinesque tendencies." She went. Think self-indulgence and an unfit management structure.
Jill Abramson is a still more jolting case. The New York Times, in the words of her successor, Dean Baquet, likes to see itself as "the greatest news operation in history." Automatically, therefore, this ought to be the greatest editorial upheaval in history as the first black editor supplants the first female one amid furious tales of sexual discrimination and pay inequality.