Jill Abramson’s ouster from the New York Times

Last week, someone leaked a copy of a New York Times report on innovation that is shockingly good. It clearly identified the major problems facing the newspaper in an increasingly digital world, and it made some smart recommendations for transforming the Times into a “digital first” publication. If the Times were to follow them, it would have a large and positive impact on the paper. And the fact that the team behind the report was led by Arthur Gregg Sulzberger, the heir to the Sulzberger family that controls the paper, ensures that it will be taken seriously.

Nevertheless, translating the report’s recommendations into action will be very difficult. As Ezra Klein points out, the report includes an excellent summary of Clay Christensen’s concept of disruption. The report correctly observes that publications like Buzzfeed are posing exactly the kind of disruptive threat Christensen wrote about. But what the report doesn’t mention is the sobering conclusion of Christensen’s research: companies faced with disruptive threats almost never manage to handle them gracefully.

One of the best parts of New York Times’ innovation report (summary here, full document here) is page 16’s insanely clear explanation of “disruption”:

Over the past couple of years, a disruptive product has become a buzzword meaning, roughly, “a new thing that a lot of people buy.” But that’s not what’s useful about the idea of disruption at all. The original theory comes from Clayton Christensen’s study of things like the hard drive and steel industries where he realized that disruptive products tend to combine new technologies, cheaper production, and — crucially — worse products.

Concurrent to the dramatic firing of top editor Jill Abramson, the New York Times has been in the news thanks to the leaking of a 96-page Innovation Report that offers a scathing internal assessment of the paper’s digital strategy. It is the most thorough look at the insides of the most important newspaper in the country that we have ever seen. What’s more, in keeping with the high standards of the New York Times it’s simply an excellent piece of reporting and analysis.

The report identifies a number of operational shortcomings of The New York Times’ digital operation, mostly related to things like optimization of content for search and the packaging and dissemination of content on social media. Beyond that, it offers three key structural critiques of the way the paper operates:

It’s worth being skeptical about the details dribbling out of the break between the New York Times and Jill Abramson right now.

A good rule of thumb for this kind of thing is that if the principals aren’t talking, then the stories are probably wrong — or at least incomplete — in very important ways. It’s almost impossible for a reporter, no matter how good, to deliver a clear description of a negotiation where the people doing the negotiating aren’t cooperating. Instead you get a lot of second-hand (or worse) information, some of it from sources who don’t know nearly as much as they think they do, some of it dressed-up to sound more authoritative by reporters or pundits who want to seem like they’re more in the loop than they are.

The New York Times’ own reporting on the NYT adds a new axis of conflict to the story saying that Dean Baquet, number two under Abramson and now the new boss, was “angered over a decision by Ms. Abramson to try to hire an editor from The Guardian, Janine Gibson, and install her alongside Mr. Baquet in a co-managing editor position without consulting him.”

Easy to see why that would anger someone, but it’s still not every day that when boss and subordinate disagree about something, the boss gets fired and the subordinate gets to take over.