Editorial standards at the New York Times: What has four legs and goes “Woof, Woof, Woof”?

Over at the New Yorker, Ken Auletta devotes what appears by my count to be about twenty column feet to the long, happy career of NYT Executive Editor Jill Abramson. Somewhere around the twelve-foot mark Ken mentions that while Abramson was managing editor of the Times, she “began writing a popular online column for the Times about her dog,” whose name, if you must know, is Scout. Yeah, the managing editor of the newspaper of record takes advantage of her lofty position to pay herself to write a column about her damn dog, which column has of course now been turned into a book.* What did staff think about that? Ken has the inside scoop:

“’She knew before she did the puppy diaries that she would get a lot of grief,’ Trish Hall, the deputy editorial-page editor who edited the column, says. ‘She didn’t care. I like it that she’s got this rich life. It used to be that women wouldn’t talk about when their kid had a dentist appointment. Jill doesn’t pretend that work is the only thing in her life.’”

Yeah, she’s got a rich life, all right. She owns a dog! And, apparently, a highly flexible conscience.

Afterwords
Auletta is perhaps not so censorious I have been. “Say what you will about the grayer days of the Times in mid-century,” he gushes, “but it was always hard to imagine James Reston writing a book about a beloved household pet.”

Well, as a vaguely Sixties dude, by birth if not by inclination, I was never much of a Reston fan (he praised the Vietnam War; I fought it), but I will say in his behalf that he never ran a column about his damn dog, and more power to him for that.