Our Team

Jill Abramson leads the Burnes Center’s Initiative on Investigative Solutions Journalism. She is a journalist who spent 17 years in the most senior editorial positions at The New York Times, where she was the first woman to serve as Washington bureau chief, managing editor, and executive editor. Before joining the Times, she was deputy Washington bureau chief and an investigative reporter covering money and politics at The Wall Street Journal for nine years. She was the editor of Legal Times in Washington, D.C.

She is the author of six books, including Strange Justice, which she wrote with Jane Mayer and Merchants of Truth, a narrative history of the digital transition of the news media. From 2015-2019 she also wrote a weekly political column for The Guardian. Random House in 2021 and 2022 published two books she wrote for middle-schoolers, What Is Congress and What is the Supreme Court.

Recent articles by Abramson have been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe and the Columbia Journalism Review, among others. She has been a frequent political commentator for BBC News. 

She has won many journalism awards and a Bok Award for her successful teaching.

Prior to joining Northeastern, she taught in Harvard’s English department as a lecturer on nonfiction narrative writing and journalism, In past years, she taught undergraduate writing seminars at Yale and Princeton. Abramson is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and The American Philosophical Society. She served on the boards of the Columbia University School of Journalism, Pro Publica and the Knight-Wallace Foundation. She is a 1976 graduate of Harvard. She grew up in New York City, is married and has two children.