In September, Jill Abramson will replace Bill Keller as the executive editor of The New York Times. Abramson has been at The New York Times since 1997, joining the paper as its Washington bureau chief. She has been the managing editor since 2003. She discusses the role of the Times in the digital era, how the paper's pay wall is faring and why economic reporting is so crucial to journalism.

"I've been managing editor for eight years, working in a close partnership partnership with Bill Keller, I think it helps a lot that both of us have been correspondents and know the up and down cycle of working for a long time on an important story," she says. "It can be sort of a manic-depressive work cycle and I think it does make you understand some of the pressures that our reporters are under, which have greatly increased with the warp speed of the news cycle these days."