New York Times chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr.'s firing of the paper's executive editor, Jill Abramson, is being seen through several different interpretive lenses. There are those, like Susan Glasser and Amanda Bennett, who see it in the context of the treatment of women editors in the workplace. There are others who see it in the context of the struggles of print newspapers to reinvent themselves for a digital age. But another way to look at it — and an intriguing one — is as the latest development in what is both a competition and a courtship between the New York Times Company and Bloomberg, L.P., and their proprietors, the Ochs-Sulzberger family and Michael R. Bloomberg.

It's a competition, because the New York Times and Bloomberg News compete for news and for staff. As Sarah Ellison reports in Vanity Fair, Ms. Abramson's replacement as executive editor of the Times, Dean Baquet, "had earlier been offered a job at Bloomberg News," and as Mr. Sulzberger put it to Vanity Fair, "we risked losing Dean."

Had Mr. Baquet decamped to Bloomberg, he would have followed a platoon of talented Times editors, including David Shipley, Jonathan Landman, Timothy O'Brien, Mary Duenwald, Paula Dwyer, James Gibney, Tobin Harshaw, Katy Roberts, Clark Hoyt, and Winnie O'Kelley. They are lured in part by the higher compensation offered by Bloomberg — "outsized salaries," as the Times described them in one news article.

The two news organizations cover each others' troubles with glee.

The Times was all over the story of Bloomberg reporters using Bloomberg terminal data to assist their reporting on Bloomberg financial services data customers such as Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase. And the Times fronted a news article about Bloomberg's decision to delay publication of articles that might anger the Chinese government. A Bloomberg reporter involved in that episode, Michael Forsythe, was later hired by the Times.

Bloomberg, meanwhile, has been aggressively covering Ms. Abramson's exit. "Sulzberger, Abramson and Keller didn't immediately respond to calls to their mobile phones," said one article by Bloomberg reporter Edmund Lee, who apparently both has Mr. Sulzberger's cellphone number and isn't afraid to use it. Al Hunt, a Bloomberg columnist and television personality who is a pal of Abramson's from their days as colleagues at the Wall Street Journal, went on Bloomberg TV to declare that Mr. Sulzberger firing of two executive editors and a CEO in 11 years "raises serious questions about his management style, doesn't it?"

All the tension, though, masks and betrays a certain romantic attraction. For as is widely recognized at both Bloomberg and the Times, Bloomberg is the likeliest purchaser of the Times if the Ochs Sulzberger family — which at this point includes not only Ochses and Sulzbergers but also Dolnicks, Goldens, Perpiches, Greenspons, Greens, Dryfooses, Kirschts and Cohens — decide to sell.

And that decision is the elephant in the room. The Times itself, in a news article published in January of this year, described a meeting between Michael Bloomberg and the staff of Bloomberg Businessweek magazine in which, "when asked if he would be interested in buying The New York Times, he joked that he was not, partly because he would not be able to influence the coverage." The New York Post last week quoted a Bloomberg source as saying, "Mike doesn't think about buying the Times, mostly because it's not for sale."

But what if it were for sale? Other newspaper families — the Chandlers that owned the Los Angeles Times, the Bancrofts that owned the Wall Street Journal, even the Grahams that owned the Washington Post — have sold. Family control of the Times rests with an entity called the 1997 Trust, so named for the year of its creation, a date one year before Google was created and a moment when it would have required a prophet to foresee the havoc that the Internet would wreak on the newspaper business. The Trust is set up to last 21 years after the death of the last surviving child of Iphigene Ochs Sulzberger (Two of the four, Marian Heiskell and Ruth Holmberg, remain alive). At least until then, the trustees are directed not to sell the paper, unless they determine that doing so would better achieve the trust's primary objective, which is, according to the Times proxy statement, "to maintain the editorial independence and the integrity of the New York Times and to continue it as an independent newspaper, entirely fearless, free of ulterior influence and unselfishly devoted to the public welfare."

Bloomberg certainly has the money to buy it. Forbes puts his wealth at $32.6 billion, an upward revision that followed an astute New York Sun article in 2006. That dwarfs the New York Times Company's market capitalization of about $2 billion. Mr. Bloomberg's assets outside the financial information and terminal business are managed by Willett Advisors, a firm run by Steven Rattner, a former New York Times reporter who is a pal of Arthur Sulzberger Jr. and who is a contributor to the Times op-ed page. Mr. Bloomberg grew up in Medford, Mass., home of Tufts, where Arthur Sulzberger Jr. went to college. The Times endorsed Mr. Bloomberg for mayor in 2005 and again in 2009, though its news coverage sometimes riled the mayor. Mr. Bloomberg even is a student of Spanish, which may help with managing Carlos Slim Helu, another big New York Times shareholder.

It's possible to make the case that the gusher of revenues from Bloomberg's financial information, analytics, and trading platform terminal business are a better guarantor of editorial independence than are the Times' diminishing print revenues and their uncertain digital replacement, though if the fear that China would retaliate for news coverage by restricting terminal sales did indeed affect the Bloomberg news coverage, that would tend to undercut that case. David Warsh points out that Bloomberg employs roughly twice as many journalists as the Times does.

If editorial independence were the sole criterion, the owning family might hold on. Sometime down the road, though, there will be estate tax to pay. So since 2010, the Sulzbergers have been gradually selling. The family's economic ownership of the company has declined to 13 percent from 19 percent over the past four years. A company spokesman told the Wall Street Journal the sale of the shares, which would be worth about $146 million, was because of "estate planning and long term estate taxes."

Wouldn't it be something if the family that owned the Times were ultimately dislodged from its perch because of taxes on the rich that remained in place in part because of enthusiastic Times editorials like this one denouncing "the false claims and warped premises of ardent estate-tax cutters"? If Republicans ever realize that the estate tax could dislodge the Sulzberger family from the Times, they may be tempted to rethink their support for its repeal. Or perhaps the Times editorial writers will rethink that language about false claims and warped premises — that is, if they aren't too busy polishing their resumes and sending them over to Bloomberg View.

From a New York Times dispatch headlined, "Despite Calls for Release, Activist in Occupy Case Gets Three Months":

As Ms. McMillan was led out of the court in handcuffs to continue her sentence on Rikers Island, some of her supporters began to sing "We Shall Not Be Moved," the famous protest song, as they filed out of court.

If the song is really "famous," is it really necessary for the Times to tell readers that it's famous?

One of the hazards of the effort by the New York Times to remake itself as a "global" newspaper by integrating the corpse of the International Herald-Tribune is that articles show up in the U.S. newspaper that might make sense to European readers but baffle American ones. An example is a dispatch from Berlin that appears in todays Times by Melissa Eddy, a veteran of the IHT:

BERLIN — Swiss voters resoundingly rejected on Sunday a proposed minimum wage that would have been the world's highest, a move widely seen as reflecting an aversion to state intervention in the liberal economic policies that are the bedrock of Switzerland's prosperity...."Switzerland, especially in popular votes, has never had a tradition of approving state intervention in the labor markets," said Daniel Kubler, a professor of political science at the University of Zurich. "A majority of Swiss has always thought, and still seems to think, that liberal economic principles are the basis of their model of success."

This is the classical, European-style definition of liberal as free-market. To Americans used to a domestic political debate in which the "liberals" are the ones favoring a government-mandated increase in the minimum wage, this terminology is confusing. It is satisfying, or at least amusing, however, to see the Times acknowledge in a news article that it's been a free-market approach that has been the basis of Swiss economic success.

Given how much ink the New York Times has spilled on hedge fund manager Bill Ackman's Herbalife short and other business adventures, you'd think the newspaper could manage to spell his name correctly in the Sunday social column. Instead, they have him as "Ackerman."

Over at Bloomberg News, Amanda Gordon covered the same event and spelled Ackman's name correctly.

Several readers have asked what I make of the dismissal of Jill Abramson as executive editor of the Times.

It seems to me that there are several takeaway points or explanatory frameworks. Among them:

*In a family business, the executives, no matter how high they rank, need to remember that they work for the family. People are comparing Jill Abramson to her predecessor as ousted Times editor, Howell Raines. The comparison that resonated more for me, though, is that of Lance Primis, the business-side Times guy who resigned in 1996 after making a pass at the CEO job, which Arthur Ochs Sulzberger wanted to go to his son, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr.

* Liberals are a bunch of hypocrites. Thus while the Times has been crusading editorially for legislation to assure that women get equal pay for equal work, its own female executive editor, Jill Abramson, was paid less than her male predecessor, and when she, as the New Yorker reported, "had a lawyer make polite inquiries about the pay and pension disparities," the paper fired her, possibly running afoul, at least in spirit, of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

•The internal politics of the Times are poisonous. The Times has a newsroom of more than 1,000 people, nearly all of whom think they are brilliant enough to edit the newspaper and many of whom are willing to stab each other in the back to advance their chances.

•Abramson made some personnel moves that didn't work out. She hired a national editor, Sam Sifton, who then moved aside. She hired a Washington bureau chief, David Leonhardt, who then moved aside. And Washington and national were supposed to be her core expertise, substance-wise.

•She got tagged "abrasive." This happens to a lot of smart New York Jews. It happened to Larry Summers at Harvard. It happened to Susan Glasser at the Washington Post. They used to say it about me. I am sympathetic to her on this front, but if she is smart, which she is, she'll learn from the experience and move on.

•The Times is in trouble. If the business were a booming success, this would not have happened. But the paper is struggling to adapt to a changing media environment. Money for things other than severance packages for high-ranking women executives who can't get along with Arthur Sulzberger Jr. (see the case of Janet Robinson) is tight. So perceived management faults are magnified more than they would be in a growing business with plenty of money to paper over minor grievances.

•Never mistake your job for your religion. Jill Abramson told the Times for the article announcing her promotion: "In my house growing up, The Times substituted for religion." She reportedly got a tattoo of the stylized "T" in the Times newspaper banner. Enthusiasm and loyalty for the company you work for is great, but unless you or your family own it and aren't going to sell it, you probably want to think very carefully before you worship it or make it a core part of your identity.

•There's a competitive market for editorial talent. Ms. Abramson's successor, Dean Baquet, reportedly was recently approached by Bloomberg, which also recently reportedly hired political reporters Mark Halperin and John Heilemann at salaries of $1 million a year. News of that overture may have hastened the editorial change at the Times.

•You don't need a college degree to succeed professionally. The Times profile of its new executive editor, Mr. Baquet, reports that he never finished college. He's in the fine company of Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg on that front.

A front-page New York Times review of the new National September 11 Memorial Museum says of the World Trade Center twin towers: "To many people, these quarter-mile-high-structures were at best two cold, giant vertical bars of silver bullion, at worst obscene gestures of capitalist might."

Many people may think the obscene thing here is not capitalism or the architecture of the World Trade Center, but the Times critic's hostility.

The Times has a 672-word, 14-paragraph news story on the front of its home page about the delay of an execution that had been scheduled for a Texas inmate, Robert James Campbell. Nowhere in the news article does it say what crime he committed.

A reader-participant-watchdog-content co-creator-community member writes of what he calls an "amazing...new approach to capital punishment stories -- obscuring or ignoring the reason for their death sentence. Take a look at the story ... Was it a brutal murder? A parking ticket? I give up."

Maybe it was insider trading?

An Associated Press article running at the Fox News site explains that Campbell had killed a 20-year-old Houston bank teller:

Campbell was convicted of capital murder for the 1991 slaying of Alexandra Rendon, who was abducted while putting gas into her car, robbed, raped and shot.

"This was not a shoot and rob and run away," Rendon's cousin, Israel Santana, said. "The agony she had to go through."

Rendon, who had been making wedding plans, was buried wearing her recently purchased wedding dress.

Maybe the Times will update its article, but at the moment, none of that information is in it. Update: The Times did eventually update the story to include the sentence, "Mr. Campbell was convicted of the abduction, rape and murder of Alexandra Rendon in 1991."

The Times magazine has a long cover story by Andrew Ross Sorkin about Timothy Geithner, timed to the release of Mr. Geithner's book Stress Test. I'll have a response elsewhere on some of the substance, but there are at least two journalistic points worth mentioning.

The first is Mr. Sorkin's reference to the Volcker Rule as "the widely popular regulation barring commercial banks from proprietary trading." No polling data is given as support for this claim. I doubt most people know what the Volcker Rule is. Plenty of people who do know what it is do not like it. And when one tells people who aren't sure what they think of the rule that it has an 850-page preamble, it may not be so popular. Mr. Sorkin seems so convinced of the Volcker Rule's popularity that he repeats the unsupported claim a second time, writing of Mr. Geithner, "when he had the chance to jump on popular issues, like the Volcker Rule, he declined."

The second journalistic point is a reference to Robert Rubin. The Times article says he "came up through Goldman Sachs and eventually joined the board of Citigroup, where he has been blamed in some circles for its taking on excessively risky debt that nearly caused the firm to collapse." I'm hardly a defender of Robert Rubin, but this is a journalistic cheap shot. Mr. Rubin gets no defense, and the Times doesn't give its own assessment, other than implicitly, of whether this blame is justified or falsely placed. We don't even learn who is doing the blaming, just a passive "has been blamed in some circles." Which circles? Andrew Ross Sorkin has been blamed in some circles for bad journalism, but I have a certain degree or respect for him because I think he works hard and isn't reflexively hostile to capitalism, so I would never write an article that said "Andrew Ross Sorkin has been blamed in some circles for bad journalism" without either giving his response or making clear that I don't entirely agree with those doing that blaming.

"House Vote on Former I.R.S. Official Signals Element of G.O.P. Election Strategy" is the headline of a Times news article about the vote to hold Lois Lerner in contempt of Congress. This is an attempt at interpretive reporting. It seems to me that it is applied more often to Republicans, who are assumed to be politically motivated, than to Democrats, who are assumed to be selfless. But the nice thing about it is that it is an interpretive lens that can be applied to any story. Imagine: "Obama Effort on Minimum Wage Increase Signals Element of Democratic Election Strategy." "Obama Effort on Expanded Health Care Coverage Signals Element of Democratic Election Strategy.' We are in a democracy, so pretty much everything politicians do signals an element of their election strategy. Most readers understand that already without having it spelled out; some readers, including this one, would probably prefer if the Times would just report on the news from Washington without attributing political motives to every development. The least we can ask is that if the Times is going to do this attribution of political motives, the newspaper be evenhanded about it.

The New York Times manages to run a long, front-of-the-business-section article about a Department of Transportation emergency order about the safety of oil being transported by rail without mentioning:

1. Warren Buffett, whose Berkshire Hathaway owns the Burlington, Northern, and Santa Fe, a big railroad.

2. Senator Schumer, who has been agitating on this issue

3. the Keystone XL pipeline, which would take some of the oil off the railroads.

The story would have been better had it brought those newsworthy people and issues in.

A restaurant review that runs on the front of the Times food section includes the sentence: "The chef Dan Barber, who researched Mr. Passard's career for his recent book, 'The Third Plate,' points out that L'Arpège's devotion to vegetables expands on ideas pioneered by the nouvelle cuisine generation."

The Third Plate comes out May 20, so it would be more accurate to describe it as "forthcoming" instead of "recent."

The Times public editor, Margaret Sullivan, devoted her Sunday column in the paper to an issue raised here, and along the way she included a nice mention and link to this site.

A front-page Times article reports on Mayor de Blasio's plans for "affordable" housing. The article reports that "New York City will commit $8.2 billion in public funds to a 10-year housing plan" and says, "The de Blasio administration wants to invest more in affordable housing than Mr. Bloomberg did, and in less time."

Smartertimes reader-contributor-watchdog-participant-community member-content co-creator Colin writes to notice, shrewdly, that the word "spend" never occurs in the news article. He writes:

Rather the government "commit[s]" and "invests" taxpayer dollars (although the return on this investment is never discussed). I guess spending is only something that happens in relation to the defense budget (used three times in this February editorial).

"Invest" is biased Times-speak for government spending that the newspaper favors.

Back in 2011, David Leonhardt wrote a New York Times article headlined "Stocks Are Still Expensive" that reported stocks "are fairly expensive right now relative to earnings." He reported that "stocks would have to fall another 6 percent from their current level to return to the 50-year average."

I called attention to that article back in 2012, writing, "the next time he makes a stock market call, you may want to take it with caution." If you had read Leonhardt in 2011 and decided stocks were too expensive, you would have missed out on the 57 percent gain in the Standard and Poor's 500 Index that has happened since he wrote that 2011 "Stocks Are Still Expensive" article.

Now Mr. Leonhardt is back to his old tricks, with an article in today's Times headlined "Time To Worry About Stock Market Bubbles." It's an expanded version of the same story he wrote back in 2011, mentioning the same authorities — Robert Shiller of Yale, Benjamin Graham, Warren Buffett, David Dodd. He reports, "Based on history, stocks look either very expensive or somewhat expensive right now."

Well, they looked expensive to Mr. Leonhardt back in August of 2011, and since then they've gone up another 57 percent!

If he keeps writing this column over and over again, he may eventually be right, but to a reader it's useful more as entertainment than as a guide for allocating capital.

Times executive editor Jill Abramson's article about the experiences of herself and three Times colleagues separately being hit as pedestrians by cars or trucks is fascinating and well-crafted, but I have a complaint about this one passage. She writes:

In the emergency department at St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital Center, where Ms. Fuhs was taken by ambulance, the doctors did a CT scan of her head: She had a concussion. When she told the doctors about pain in her neck, shoulder and hand, they told her to follow up with her primary physician as soon as possible. The next day she did, and when she complained about her shoulder, she was told it was severely bruised and swollen and would eventually heal; she should go home, ice it and take some naproxen, the active ingredient in Aleve. (It took three more visits and almost a month for doctors to figure out that her injuries included a fractured clavicle, a labrum tear and a rotator cuff tear, which required surgery.)

The Abramson article is about the human experience of these accidents — "How Being Hit by a Vehicle Changed Times Colleagues' Lives" — but it strikes me that there is a follow-up article to be written, or a sidebar, about the health care quality and policy aspect of the story. What is the name of the primary care physician who missed the fractured clavicle? Why did the St. Lukes-Roosevelt emergency room miss it? What do they have to say for themselves? Did they get paid in full by the insurance companies for the care they provided? What do other physicians say about the quality of that care? Did it fully meet quality standards or fail to meet standards? Does Ms. Fuhs still use that primary physician, or has she switched doctors out of dissatisfaction? If she has switched out of dissatisfaction, wouldn't it be useful for the Times to let readers know that, along with the doctor's name, so they can take it into account before going to see that doctor themselves? How often do these sorts of missed diagnoses happen, what can be done to prevent them, and what is the cost in health and dollars? Do the emergency room doctors or the primary care physician even know that they missed those other injuries in their initial examinations, and, if they do, have they changed their practices at all to make sure that they don't repeat the error?

It seems to me that the Times should go after these sorts of medical errors or missed diagnoses with at least the same investigative zeal that it has devoted to matters such as NSA surveillance or the GM ignition recall. No one expects doctors to be perfect, but there's a place for some accountability journalism to be done here along with the human interest journalism. It would be a good assignment for Elisabeth Rosenthal.