Listening to Jill Abramson on Charlie Rose

After reading the New Yorker article about her, I was SO curious to hear her voice.

The first thing that people usually notice about Jill Abramson is her voice. The equivalent of a nasal car honk, it’s an odd combination of upper- and working-class. Inside the newsroom, her schoolteacherlike way of elongating words and drawing out the last word of each sentence is a subject of endless conversation and expert mimicry. When she appeared on television after her appointment as executive editor, the blogger Ben Trawick-Smith wrote, “Speech pathologists and phoneticians, knock yourself out: what’s going on with Abramson’s speech?” He was deluged with responses. One speculated that, like a politician, she had trained herself to limit the space between sentences so that it would be hard to interrupt her; another said she had probably acquired the accent in an attempt to not sound too New York while she was an undergraduate at Harvard. The writer Amy Wilentz, a college roommate of Abramson’s, has said that the accent probably has something to do with trying to sound a bit like Bob Dylan.

As always, Charlie Rose instinctively knows about whom I read in the blogs every day, and then has them in as guests that night.  

I’m watching him interview her now, and yes, her voice is sort of insanely self-conscious sounding.  But what she’s saying is charming!  In regards to her first conversations about assuming her new role at the Times, she confessed that:

She [bad Jill, as according to Arthur Sulzberger, Jr.] needs to work on listening.