NYTimes department head meeting regarding Abramson was off the record

Peter Lattman, the media editor at the New York Times, spoke with Times Insider about how the paper covered the firing of executive editor Jill Abramson earlier this year.

Here is an excerpt:

Q. What was it like that day, that week?

A. I’d love to tell you that the media desk was all over this news, but we were in the dark along with nearly everyone else. The first inkling something big might be going down came at 12:14 p.m. when I clicked open an email: “Please come to a masthead/dept head meeting at 2:00 p.m. today in the page one conference room/3rd floor. Thank you.”

Impromptu meetings rarely, if ever, happen at The Times, so I emailed a few other department heads to see if they knew what was up. They didn’t.

When I walked into the page-one conference room, the publisher, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., was seated in a chair often occupied by Jill. He began by introducing Dean Baquet as the new executive editor of The New York Times. Though the meeting was off the record, I began taking notes. “Stop writing, Peter!” a masthead editor snapped under her breath. I put down my pen.

The meeting ended at about 2:20 p.m. While I was in the conference room, Bill Brink, the deputy media editor, had gotten word that The Times would be issuing a news release at 2:30 p.m., giving us barely enough time to post a short story, which went up on the Times website just as the announcement went out.

Read more here.