On January 26th, Marty Baron, the executive editor of the Washington Post, announced that he will step down at the end of February. In a memo to the staff, Baron wrote, “From the moment I arrived at The Post, I have sought to make an enduring contribution while giving back to a profession that has meant so much to me and that serves to safeguard democracy.” Baron, who is sixty-six, came to the Post in 2013 after an already storied career in journalism that included stints running the Miami Herald and the Boston Globe. At the Globe, he oversaw the publication of groundbreaking reporting into sexual abuse in the Catholic Church. (In the movie “Spotlight,” based on the story of the Globe’s investigation, Baron is played by Liev Schreiber.)
Less than a year after Baron arrived at the Post, it was bought by the Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who invested significant resources in the paper. Under Baron, the Post broke numerous stories on malfeasance in the Trump Administration, and published the Afghanistan Papers. Baron has occasionally clashed with staff, especially with regard to their use of social media. The reporter Wesley Lowery left the paper after Baron warned him that his tweets about race, politics, and other subjects violated the company’s social-media policy; the reporter Felicia Sonmez was suspended—but later reinstated—for tweeting a story about sexual-assault allegations against Kobe Bryant right after his death.
This week, I spoke by phone with Baron about his time at the Post. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed some of the controversies of his tenure, how the paper has covered Bezos, and what Baron wanted to achieve during his time in Washington.
How is running a news organization different in 2021 than it was in 2001, when you started running the Boston Globe?
It’s significantly different, particularly because of the Internet and because of social media. And obviously we’re having to report twenty-four hours a day, and essentially every minute. That wasn’t really the case in 2001. There was the Internet then, of course, but it wasn’t as big a part of our business. It did not influence everything that we did. So that’s changed. And then, of course, social media’s grown. It’s a place where we’re active and our journalists are active as well. It’s not something that we confronted in 2001. Because of the Internet, the environment is such that the reactions to our stories are instantaneous and things happen at a pace that wasn’t the case prior to 2001.
Was there a moment in your career when you felt as if you could feel the change?
Well, there are a couple. I think that certainly with the Church story. It was no longer possible for the Church to treat these kinds of accusations as strictly a local matter, something that would only be seen by people in a particular community because the newspaper was only distributed in that community. People could organize around the country and around the world in a way that they would not have been able to before. So, that was a significant development.
And then, I think, certainly as broadband penetrated much of the United States, it started to have a tremendous financial impact on our industry. Advertising was shifting dramatically over to new sites that were starting up—whether it was HuffPost or BuzzFeed or many others—but advertising was being diverted to social media as well, and to search companies like Google. So, they were sucking up our revenue, and we had fewer resources to do our work. And that was putting tremendous pressure on our capacity to do journalism as we had previously thought about it.
You seemed to be saying that, with the Church story, there was a certain benefit to it—a utility in terms of the actual story.
Absolutely.
That aspect of it aside, do you like the Internet’s role in journalism? Is it something that you find fun or interesting? Or do you miss the old days in some way?
I’m beyond missing the old days, frankly. I think at the time that it was all happening, I was preoccupied with the financial pressures that it was putting on us—the fact that it led to layoffs, and that it was having a dramatic impact in terms of the volume and quality of the journalism that we could practice. But I recognized that it’s just the way it is, and that we needed to find a way to succeed in this environment. I was finished mourning what we had lost, because I think that, as in life, when you mourn the loss of a friend or a family member, there comes a time when you have to move on and make the best of it. And so, I was determined to make the best of it and to learn what we needed to do in order to succeed, so that we could continue to practice journalism as we believed it should be practiced—journalism of high quality.
And the Internet does give us certain huge benefits, and that is that we reach a very large audience that we were not able to reach previously, and that we can distribute our journalism all over the country and all over the world. And that’s a huge plus. So our audience is dramatically larger than it was before, even if the Internet, at least for a while—and for many media organizations, even today—had a damaging effect on the finances of our organizations. I should add that it allowed us to tell stories in very different ways. We now have available to us tools that we never had before: the capacity to do video, the capacity to do interactive graphics, animation, now audio. All of that. And that leads to very powerful storytelling. We’re only now, I think, beginning to learn how to use that to the greatest effect, and there’s some really powerful journalism that’s being done as a result. We can now compete—for example, with video—with the networks.
National news organizations such as the Post or the Times have managed to do O.K. in this current era, while local journalism has struggled. Is the success of a place like the Times or the Post coming at the expense of local journalism? And if that’s the case, what do we do about it?
I don’t think it’s coming at the expense of local journalism. I think we’re talking about two different things. Keep in mind that it wasn’t that long ago when people were talking about the New York Times going bankrupt. [In 2009] its share price had fallen to about four dollars a share from about forty dollars or so. People were talking about the Washington Post going out of business as well. They were talking about us being eclipsed by the likes of HuffPost and BuzzFeed, you name it. And so, it’s not as if it was an easy path to get where we are, but we have now learned what our business model should be. I don’t think our gains have been at the expense of anybody. It’s just that we’re in a different position than local journalism. The thing is that they have a greater challenge. That’s just a fact.
And I should mention, by the way, that there was a time when people thought that local journalism was going to be a better place to be than national publications, and that’s because they seemed more protected from the Internet. That turned out not to be the case, but there was a time where people thought that local journalism was going to be the stronger of the two. I think that people have lost some historical perspective here, but local journalism has to find its own model—and I believe pretty firmly that that model means requiring people to pay for it. For the longest time, when we published only print newspapers, people paid for it. We didn’t give it away for free, and people didn’t expect us to give it away for free. And frankly, we didn’t charge that much for it. So the only way for local publications, local media outlets, to succeed, I believe, is ultimately to demand that people pay if they want quality journalism.
When you think about your mandate, did you ever see it consciously as competing with the Times?
Yeah. Well, I mean, look, when Jeff Bezos acquired the Post, in 2013, he fundamentally changed our strategy—and that was to go from being a news organization that was focussed primarily on our region to being a news organization that would be national, and even international. He said at the time, and he was correct, that we are in an ideal position to do so because we are in the nation’s capital. That’s a good base for that. We have the name The Washington Post, which can be leveraged to a national scale, unlike a lot of other names of publications around the country. And we have a history and a heritage that shape our identity, which is, going back to Watergate, shining a light on dark corners. The implication is that we didn’t have to go off to a retreat to figure out who the hell we were. So, with that, we became national.
But one of the other things that he said at the time was that we really needed to focus on the customer, and not particularly on the competitor: What are we going to do that actually appeals to the customer? And I think we did that. Now it’s only natural that, when you do that and you start to have some success—which we fortunately did—that we would start thinking about who our competitors are and how we can position ourselves. Naturally, as you know, there are not that many national publications or media outlets, and, certainly, there are fewer with national-newspaper heritage. The Times, of course, is eminent among them, and so we do think of ourselves as competing with the New York Times. But we’re not obsessed with the competition. We were really, I think, obsessed with what we could do to make ourselves as appealing as possible to the public and gain more readers. And, so, that’s how we see ourselves.