As the first female executive editor of the New York Times  from 2011 to2014, Jill Abramson fought to change the newspaper’s culture, mentoring female reporters, choosing female bureau chiefs and focusing more attention on stories about race and gender issues. While still an undergraduate, Abramson both served as arts editor for the Harvard Independent and worked for Time Magazine from 1973 to 1976. After graduating Radcliffe and Harvard in 1976, she worked in politics for a time and then covered the 1980 presidential election for NBC News. In 1981 Abramson became senior staff reporter for the American Lawyer. In 1986 she became editor-in-chief of Washington DC’s Legal Times, then worked for the Wall Street Journal from 1988 to 1997, rising to become deputy bureau chief. She then joined the staff of the New York Times in 1997, becoming its Washington bureau chief in 2000 and executive editor in 2011. In 2014 Abramson was fired from the New York Times amidst controversy over whether she was being discriminated against for her gender, but she refused to comment on the issue, saying only that she had been proud to work for the Times. From 2015 to 2019 she composed a weekly column for The Guardian. She is the author of a number of books, including Obama: The Historic Journey (2009), Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas (1994), and two books for young readers.  Her 2019 book Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts compares the digital news outlets Vice and Buzzfeed against the traditional newspapers The New York Times and The Washington Post. However, the book sold poorly due to it containing multiple factual errors and plagiarized passages. She has taught at Princeton (2000-2001), Yale (2007-2011), Harvard (2014-ongoing), and Northeastern (ongoing). She heads the Initiative on Investigative Solutions Journalism at the Burnes Center for Social Change at Northeastern University. She continues to write articles for a number of major newspapers.