Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
The Schmooze

Jill Abramson’s New Startup Pays $100,000

Getty Images

Former Executive Editor of The New York Times Jill Abramson is back in the news — and it’s a bit of a head scratcher. Along with media entrepreneur Steven Brill, she has proposed a startup that would pay writers $100,000 (yes, that’s the correct amount of zeroes) for investigative journalism pieces that are too long for a magazine but shorter than the average book.

Abramson announced the company at a conference at last weekend’s Journalism and Women’s Symposium and said that the idea has already generated interest from investors.

It has also generated a lot of skepticism.

Brill told Capital New York magazine that the startup will be subscription-based and produce one longform piece a month. If the company sticks to paying around $100,000 per piece, it will need thousands of subscribers right out of the gate.

Brill, who is the founder of TruTV (formerly Court TV) and The American Lawyer, has also had his share of failed projects.

Wondering where the Abramson-Brill duo got the idea? Well, Brill wrote a 26,000 word piece on health care last year in Time magazine that was first rejected by The New Republic.

And that sound you hear? That’s every aspiring writer in the universe dusting off their desk-drawer manuscripts.

A message from our Publisher & CEO Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

We’ve set a goal to raise $260,000 by December 31. That’s an ambitious goal, but one that will give us the resources we need to invest in the high quality news, opinion, analysis and cultural coverage that isn’t available anywhere else.

If you feel inspired to make an impact, now is the time to give something back. Join us as a member at your most generous level.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

With your support, we’ll be ready for whatever 2025 brings.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.