Then, the night of April 23, Politico—the Washington trade paper that aims to “drive the conversation”—published a story suggesting that Abramson’s young editorship was already a failure. Quoting anonymous former and current Times employees, Politico claimed she was widely considered “stubborn,” “condescending,” “difficult to work with,” “unreasonable,” “impossible,” “disengaged,” and “uncaring”—“on the verge of losing the support of the newsroom.” One staffer confided to media reporter Dylan Byers: “The Times is leaderless right now ... Jill is very, very unpopular.”

A petite woman who speaks in an exaggerated Upper West Side drawl that evokes The Nanny meets Harvard (where she was active in undergraduate journalism), Abramson was home alone in Tribeca the night the story broke. Her husband of 32 years, Harry Griggs, was out, as were their two adult children, when she read it online.

“I cried,” Abramson tells me. “I should say it went right off me, but I’m just being honest. I did cry. But by the next morning, I wasn’t completely preoccupied by it anymore. I had my cry and that was that. And [Times Co. chairman] Arthur Sulzberger came down and was very supportive. He basically said, ‘It goes with the territory. Don’t let it get to you.’ ” The publisher also invoked what he calls the Second Law of Journalism: “It’s not your fault. It’s just your turn.”