The Original Endasher

As a freshman, instead of trying to join the Harvard Crimson, Abramson wrote profiles and theatre reviews for the weekly campus paper, the Independent. “I thought of Jill as an artsy person,” her colleague Stephen Adler, who is the editor-in-chief of Reuters, recalls. As a junior, Abramson became the editor of the arts section, under Allison Mitchell. “I would never have predicted she would become the editor of the New York Times,” Mitchell says. “The people who thought they wanted to go into journalism and make connections went to the Crimson.” One of Abramson’s Harvard friends, Peter Kaplan, who is the editorial director of Fairchild Fashion Media, says, “Jill always had a swagger. It was as if she were in a romantic comedy. She had the same feeling that Rosalind conveys in ‘As You Like It.’ In the last act, everything would work out. She wasn’t like the other girls at Harvard. Most of my crowd were either wonks or tough feminists who would chew your balls off. But Jill was the witty cosmopolitan who gave running commentary that was like a voice-over narration from a Billy Wilder movie.