Jill Abramson Temporarily Steps Aside as Managing Editor to Focus on Digital Side

In an unusual and temporary management shuffle, Jill Abramson, the managing editor for news at The New York Times, will step aside for six months to focus on digital operations and strategy.

Ruth Fremson/The New York Times Jill Abramson

The shift was announced in an e-mail message from Bill Keller, executive editor of The Times. While Ms. Abramson spends time on the Times’ digital operation, the managing editor’s job will be handled by three editors for two months each starting on June 1. They are Dean Baquet, an assistant managing editor and the Washington bureau chief, Susan Chira, the foreign editor, and Larry Ingrassia, the business editor.

“It’s a radical idea in the sense that no managing editor has ever said, ‘O.K., I’m going to step aside from my job and do this other thing,’” Mr. Keller said in an interview. While Ms. Abramson already oversees the Web newsroom as part of her existing role, Mr. Keller said that they both thought that “one of us should really master the whole complicated machinery of an integrated newsroom,” and “Jill came up with the idea that one of us — i.e., her — should do a full immersion.”

“We really want this to be one newsroom, and it is part of the way there, not all of the way there,” Mr. Keller said. “There is still a digital rhythm and a print rhythm, and they don’t feel synchronized.”

Ms. Abramson was a senior reporter in The Wall Street Journal’s Washington bureau, then its deputy bureau chief, before becoming Washington bureau chief for The Times in 1997. She was appointed managing editor in 2003. Mr. Keller said this announcement was not about succession planning. The executive editor of The Times is required to retire at age 65, which Mr. Keller will reach in early 2014.

When asked whether the temporary shift announced Wednesday meant that he might be retiring early, Mr. Keller answered, “No.” He added that the moves do not affect John Geddes, the other managing editor, who oversees newsroom operations. “If we pulled John out of making sure all the processes run the way they’re supposed to, it could be a train wreck,” Mr. Keller said.

Ms. Abramson will work closely with the business side on issues including the Times’ planned pay wall, Mr. Keller said, along with attending meetings on Web features and strategy. “One of the questions that we hope to resolve is what will the organizational structure be afterward” on the digital side, Mr. Keller said.

As for Ms. Abramson’s temporary replacements, Mr. Keller said the three editors were chosen because they ran “big news departments” and “pretty strong desks, so we weren’t worried about the desks falling apart in their absence.”

Ms. Chira became foreign editor in 2004, after overseeing the company’s book development and serving as editor of the Week in Review section and as deputy foreign editor, along with several reporting positions. Mr. Baquet rejoined the Times in 2007. He had been editor and managing editor of the Los Angeles Times, and before that, was national editor of The Times. Mr. Ingrassia joined The Times in his present position in 2004 from The Wall Street Journal, where he was a reporter, editor and assistant managing editor.

“Are we auditioning the next managing editor? No. Or the next executive editor? No. It’s nothing as crude as a bake-off; it’s not ‘Dancing With the Stars,’” Mr. Keller said. “It is a chance to learn more” about the three editors.

Meanwhile, it is an opportunity to see how the deputy editors in those three departments whose top editors will be filling in as managing editor “rise to the occasion,” Mr. Keller said, adding that this was one part of the announcement that did have to do with succession planning.

Past that, Mr. Keller said, the announcement does not contain any hidden meaning or signs.

“I’m fully prepared for people to misread this in 100 different ways,” Mr. Keller said, adding, “It’s an experiment.”