Updated at 9 A.M. on May 16th.

In the gossipy world of New York journalism, the firing of Jill Abramson from her position as the executive editor of the Times provoked a veritable explosion of talk, posts, and Instagram pictures of the objects of interest. And a day after her dismissal, even more details are emerging about why Arthur O. Sulzberger, Jr., the paper’s publisher, felt compelled to dismiss yet another executive editor whom he himself had anointed. The first was Howell Raines, who was forced to resign, in 2003, after the Jayson Blair plagiarism scandal and because his consistently arrogant approach to management had alienated the newsroom.

Sulzberger and Abramson had a fraught relationship almost from the start of her tenure as executive editor, nearly three years ago. He saw her as difficult, high-handed, and lacking in finesse in her management of people at the paper. She, in turn, was increasingly resentful of his intrusions into her command of editorial operations, and of his increasingly close relationship with Mark Thompson, the company’s C.E.O., who came from England and the BBC to run the business side.

It is always hard to say what causes a final break—a firing, a divorce—but, clearly, a last straw came a few weeks ago, when Abramson, who made little secret of her displeasure with Sulzberger, decided to hire a lawyer to complain that her salary was not equal to that of her predecessor, Bill Keller. She had also been told by reliable sources at the paper that, as managing editor, she had once earned less than the managing editor of news operations, John Geddes. Abramson’s attempt to raise the salary issue at a time when tempers were already frayed seemed wrongheaded to Sulzberger and Thompson, both on its merits and in terms of her approach. Bringing in a lawyer, in particular, seems to have struck them as especially combative. Eileen Murphy, a spokeswoman for the Times, argued that there was no real compensation gap, but conceded to me that “this incident was a contributing factor” to the firing of Abramson, because “it was part of a pattern.” (Update: Murphy wrote to me after this post went up to dispute this. Her quote is accurate and in context, as I’ve confirmed in my notes. However, she now e-mails: “I said to you that the issue of bringing a lawyer in was part of a pattern that caused frustration. I NEVER said that it was part of a pattern that led to her firing because that is just not true.”)

Another episode that added to the characterization of Abramson as hard to deal with came after a decision was made to hire a second managing editor to oversee the Times’ digital endeavors. Abramson led that hiring effort. The Times, in its story on Abramson’s dismissal, said that Abramson had offered the job to Janine Gibson, the editor of Guardian U.S., “without consulting” Dean Baquet, then the managing editor and now Abramson’s successor. This implies that Abramson was operating more or less in a vacuum, without consistent consultations with her colleagues, particularly Baquet. Gibson met separately with Sulzberger and Thompson on May 5th, and had lunch with Baquet that same day. What Baquet did not know, until Gibson herself mentioned it to him at lunch, I’m told, is that she was offered a managing-editor job comparable to his own. He was, it is fair to say, unenthusiastic, and even angered.

Abramson clearly should have conferred earlier with Baquet, a failure that contributed to the impression that she could be an unskilled and insensitive executive. But the story is complicated by a previously undisclosed e-mail from April 28th, from Thompson to Abramson:

40 mins on phone to Janine…. I told her there really was a new spirit in the newsroom and she buys that and has been impressed by what’s been achieved recently. She reveres you and will need convincing that you’re going to sign up for some more years as Editor. I told her I was doing my best to persuade you that you should! … I’ll see her again when she’s in next week.

In addition to confirming that the top management of the Times was, in fact, on the same page as Abramson about this hire, the e-mail raises a question: What happened between April 28th, when Thompson urged Abramson “to sign up for some more years as Editor,” and May 14th, when she was terminated?

There was a dinner meeting between Baquet and Sulzberger on Wednesday, May 7th—two days after Baquet’s lunch with Gibson. Abramson, clearly worried that Baquet was not fully onboard, asked Sulzberger to assure Baquet that when she stepped down he would succeed her, I was told. Abramson wanted Baquet to know that this was her recommendation as well.

But, at the dinner, Baquet, an unfailingly polite and popular editor, did something unusual for him: he complained to Sulzberger. He conveyed to him, I’m told, that he felt undermined by Abramson’s failure to let him know where Gibson would be in the Times hierarchy. He also said that Abramson’s management style was too abrupt and belligerent. The next day, a depressed Sulzberger told Abramson that the meeting did not go well. And the day after that, on May 9th*, Gibson turned down the job, keeping to her plan of moving back to London and working as a deputy editor of the Guardian and the editor of its Web site.

The uncharacteristic eruption by Baquet reinforced an image of Abramson that had always troubled Sulzberger. When I profiled Abramson, in the fall of 2011, he told me that, before he appointed her as executive editor, he hesitated, worried about her managerial style. Sulzberger wondered if he should have chosen Baquet instead. (Either way, it would have been a milestone: Abramson was the first woman executive editor of the Times, and Baquet is now the first African-American.)

Sulzberger grew increasingly concerned that Abramson was a problem. Her personality was an issue for him. She had parried with Thompson over several issues, including how to handle “native advertising,” a form of advertising that can risk hiding an ad in the garb of news copy. (Murphy disputed this: “They actually took a very similar view of it—that total clarity about the difference between Times journalism and advertising was paramount, but that a way could be found to achieve that clarity,” she told me.) Abramson had made a series of management missteps—appointing a new Washington bureau chief and a new national editor—that she ended up reversing. Her style sometimes grated.