Jacob Weisberg
208 μ¢¤³£ ¬μμ¬
which sank $400 million into Vice in
2015, has in the past year written down
nearly all o its investment.
Abramson implicitly lumps together
Vice and BuzzFeed. Alongside its
frivolous lists and personality quizzes,
however, BuzzFeed has done a great deal
o high-quality journalism. And it
showed genuine courage in early 2017,
when it published the so-called Steele
dossier, a document full o troubling but
unveri¿ed allegations about Trump’s
connections to Russia, compiled by a
former British intelligence ocial.
In supporting BuzzFeed’s still contro-
versial decision to publish the dossier,
Abramson parts company with many o
her peers. But in other respects, she
remains a media conservative. She
believes there is a correct way to prac-
tice journalism: the way that The New
York Times did it before the Internet
came along and ruined everything.
Arguably, this reverence for tradition is
what made her tenure at the paper so
dicult. Rusbridger was inspired by the
new opportunities that the Internet
brought to journalism, even when he
didn’t fully understand them. Abramson
focused on the risks and losses. She
thought that software developers and
data scientists were commercial in¿ltra-
tors in the newsroom and grew increas-
ingly frustrated over their incursions
across the church-state boundary. When
the company produced a self-critical
“innovation report,” in 2014, Abramson
took it as a personal rebuke. It sealed
her fate in an unexpected way. In answer
to the report’s implicit criticism o her,
she tried to recruit Janine Gibson, an
editor from the more tech-forward
Guardian, as a deputy, without mention-
ing her plan to her existing deputy,remains aggrieved, however, at what she
sees as the unfairness o her ¿ring over
management missteps that she partly
acknowledges and partly disputes.
Abramson’s attempt to ¿lter her own,
still raw experience through the conven-
tions o objective journalism gives her
account a passive-aggressive quality,
especially when it comes to her depic-
tions o the former publisher o the Times,
Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., and her successor
as executive editor, Dean Baquet, whom
she blames for engineering her downfall.
But that part o the book is at least
entertaining as media gossip. In contrast,
Abramson hersel seems bored by her
own detailed chronicles o the other
outlets, which might partly explain how
she wound up plagiarizing a number o
sources—an act she asserts was inadver-
tent and for which she has apologized—
and making some sloppy factual errors
that were discovered by readers and, in
some cases, by the book’s subjects.
A greater fault with the book, however,
is that Abramson never comes out and
says one thing that she seems to think:
that Vice is a poor excuse for a news
organization, founded by greedy, dishon-
est people without the slightest compre-
hension o journalism. During the digital
media bubble, Vice became the darling
o middle-aged media executives, who
invested in it based on the dubious thesis
that foreign aairs could be made
relevant to young people through video
content that often focused on sex, drugs,
and violence around the world. Vice has
produced some worthwhile journalism,
most o which resulted from a partner-
ship with ̈¢ that the cable network
recently terminated. But in essence,
Vice has been a swindle, and investors
are starting to see the light: Disney,