Ellen Pollack, a good friend of Abramson who also worked at the paper, remembers her as a dogged reporter with a knack for getting the story.

“Her instincts on a story are amazing,” Pollack said. “It’s like she has a magical radar. It’s experience but also intuition and smarts.”

Steven J. Brill, the founder of American Lawyer, echoed that praise.

“She was eager,” Brill said. “She really shined quickly and progressed very rapidly where all the reporting was hard.”

But maybe more importantly, as a cub reporter at the paper, she was more than willing to put in long hours.

“A lot of people would do a story and make a few phone calls—we would have to make 100 phone calls and do a story,” Pollack said. “But we were also having a huge amount of fun. We had a little tiny space at Esquire magazine and we were all huddled together. It was like we are all dorm mates working on these stories. We were practically sitting on each other’s laps, and we all came into work on Sundays.”

So when Abramson relocated to Washington D.C. because of her husband’s job, Brill says her decision to move was a driving factor behind his decision to start a D.C. branch of American Lawyer.

When it was announced in June, Abramson’s appointment as the Times’ executive editor was not seen as a surprise by most observers. Pollack claims she knew long ago that Abramson would eventually take over.

“I always knew she was going to get this job,” Pollack said. “I told her 13 years ago that she was going to run the Times.”

In a newsroom where many of its reporters and editors have spent the entirety of their careers, Abramson is an exception. She also has not worked as a foreign correspondent for the paper, a position that many see as a required credential for the paper’s top editor.

But as a New Yorker, Abramson grew up in a family that she says worshipped the paper.

“In my house growing up, the Times substituted for religion,” she said in the Times article that accompanied the announcement that she would succeed Keller. “If the Times said it, it was the absolute truth.”

But it was at Times rival The Wall Street Journal that Abramson established herself as a top-tier reporter, working as one of the Journal’s White House correspondents.

Eventually, however, the opportunity to work at her first journalistic love presented itself. Despite reportedly being offered more money to stay, Abramson left the Journal much to the disappointment of then-Managing Editor Paul Steiger.

“Jill’s [departure] was one of the very few, one of the only I can think of, that 6 months after she left I could feel her loss in our coverage,” Stieger said. “In most cases when a star left, the system kind of reacted and someone came along, stuck to the job, developed it and we didn’t miss a beat. Jill’s departure was felt, I felt, for quite some time afterwards.”