Covering the Media
On May 14th, Jill Abramson, the first female executive editor of the Times, was abruptly fired. Within hours, Ken Auletta had written a story for newyorker.com that revealed some of the behind-the-scenes conflicts that led to her dismissal. On this week’s Out Loud podcast, Auletta joins Nicholas Thompson, the editor of newyorker.com, to discuss the strategies he used to report the story.
Auletta has been a staff writer at The New Yorker for thirty-seven years. In that time, he’s written about a number of high-profile and hard-to-access figures in politics and the media, including Rupert Murdoch and Mario Cuomo. On this podcast, he also talks about his most recent magazine article (on Hillary Clinton’s fraught relationship with the press), his winding path to The New Yorker (which included stints in Bobby Kennedy’s campaign and in the off-track betting industry), and how he goes about, in Thompson’s words, extracting “information from places you should not be able to extract information.”