Sitting at the head of the Union chamber on Wednesday afternoon, Jill Abramson dared the floor to ask her “tough questions”.  She says that whilst at dinner last week with Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger he told her to expect some difficult questions from the floor.  It seems an apt reflection of her character that she has been looking forward to these.

Abramson – who became the first female executive editor of the New York Times in September 2011 – is one tough cookie.  She has risen efficiently through the ranks of elite American journalism to take on the most senior editorial position at the Times, a newspaper whose average daily circulation exceeds 1.8 million people.  The New Yorker’s Byken Auletta describes Abramson’s manner as “abrupt” yet empathic and kind.

On first impression the most striking thing about Abramson is the way that she speaks.  Her words all last a little longer than they should and the end of each sentence is elongated, so that to listen you have to slow down and concentrate.  One might expect the monotonic quality of her drawl to bore, but Wednesday’s Union audience was enraptured; it is easy to see how this woman has managed to command the attention of newsrooms and boardrooms throughout her career.

Taking Abramson up on her dare, the first question in our interview is a hard one: she is often called one of the most powerful women in the world, so does she feel responsible for the mess?  She smiles.  “I feel a responsibility to truthfully show readers the dysfunction in government right now and explain to them why there’s such a mess, and not just to say, ‘Wow – it’s a mess’... [but to] do stories that show who really has an interest in making the mess and perpetuating the mess.”

Our interview takes place hours before US Congress finally approves the budget deal, and Abramson talks about “mess” in the context of the government shutdown: her responsibility in this instance, she says, is to make sure that her newspaper thoroughly interrogates the motives of “rich contributors who are the backers of these extreme right-wing Republicans who have shut the government down.”

If Abramson is one of the most powerful women in the world, her power is set to increase.  She is in Europe for the launch of the International New York Times – a rebranding of the International Herald Tribune – which will put the journalism of the Times on a global platform.

It is perhaps surprising that the Times is making such a move in the current climate of print journalism decline.  But Abramson points out that even as many of the Times’s competitors have closed or shrunk drastically, her newspaper “hasn’t retreated at all.”  The newsroom is the same size as ten years ago and the paper’s average circulation has increased by over 15 per cent in the last year.

The Times leads all other major American newspapers in its distribution of digital content.  In March of this year around 1.1 million people per day accessed the paper online.  Its success, then, must lie partially in its growing emphasis on multimedia platforms.  Earlier this year the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing was awarded to Times journalist John Branch for his article ‘Snow Fall’ which used videos, photos and maps to tell the story of an avalanche.

Abramson’s commitment to engaging with digital media is apparent in many of her decisions to date as executive editor.  For her, social media has changed the scope of journalism for the better: “Even with the worry that some of what’s on social media isn’t true and that people may not really be who they say they are, you still have this pool of real-time information from people who are putting their name against something.”

She says that she is proud to be the first female executive editor, but that the title comes with a weight of expectation.  When she was appointed she had “a palpable sense – and I still do – that I don’t want to let the girls’ team down. Like please God let me not fuck up!”

She adds, “The important thing in the end isn’t that I’m the first woman, it’s whether by the time I leave this job it’s completely viable that there would be the second woman and even the third woman. That will be the ultimate test of whether it means anything that I’ve been the first.”