This article was originally published on Northwestern University’s Medill Local News Initiative website and is republished here with permission.
First of two parts
As executive editor of the Washington Post, Marty Baron not only guided the newspaper through a transformative ownership change (with Amazon founder Jeff Bezos taking charge) and the turbulent Trump presidency, but he also oversaw an aggressive expansion of its journalistic mission, accompanied by significant growth in readership, revenues and influence. Rallying behind its slogan “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” the Washington Post re-established itself as a national force in journalism at a time of rising distrust in the press.
Prior to that stint, which lasted from January 2013 to his February 2021 retirement, Baron spent 11 years as the Boston Globe’s top editor. His agenda there was different: scaling back the paper’s international and national ambitions to focus its coverage and investigations on the city and region. Its Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting of the Boston Catholic priest child sex-abuse scandal was dramatized in the 2015 best picture Oscar winner “Spotlight,” with Liev Schreiber playing the unflappable Baron.
Baron also served as executive editor of the Miami Herald during the Elián González custody battle and previously worked for the Los Angeles Times and New York Times. By the time he retired, his newsrooms had collected 18 Pulitzer Prizes, including 11 at the Post. He currently serves on the Knight Foundation board and has written a book, “Collision of Power: Trump, Bezos, and The Washington Post,” that Flatiron Books will release Oct. 3.
Although Baron, 68, no longer is employed by a newspaper, he remains deeply engaged in the journalism world and has strong opinions on the state of local news, the role of owners, the track record of media pundits, the trappings of nostalgia and the necessity of making tough choices. Those topics are covered in Part 1 of this conversation, conducted from the Chicago area with Baron, who was in the Berkshires in Western Massachusetts.
The following has been edited for clarity and concision.
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Mark Caro: As a board member at the Knight Foundation, are you getting a different sense of the local news landscape than you already had?
Marty Baron: I think I was fairly familiar with the overall landscape in journalism and the local landscape as well given that I spent the vast bulk of my career in that area. But things change, and we’ve seen the growth of the nonprofit sector, which is encouraging. So I’ve learned more about that through Knight for sure.
Mark Caro: Do you feel like the conventional wisdom arrow is pointing up or down for local news?
Marty Baron: Well, I’m not suggesting that I necessarily believe in the conventional wisdom. I would say the conventional wisdom is down at the moment in local news, and that’s for a variety of reasons. We continue to see the failure of certain local news sites. Just the other day, we saw the Santa Barbara paper (the Santa Barbara News-Press) go into bankruptcy and essentially just go out of business. When you see more of that, I think people understandably become pessimistic about the future of local news. Then you see more acquisitions by outfits like Alden (Global Capital), which just acquired the San Diego (Union-Tribune) from the owner of the Los Angeles Times. And some of the leadership of that staff has decided to leave.
Mark Caro: How much of a factor is ownership of newspapers right now?
Marty Baron: I actually think it’s a significant factor. I think we can see that in certain cities, where you have good, committed, stable ownership — which would be for example, Boston Globe, where I used to be the editor; San Francisco (Chronicle), owned by Hearst, you see a commitment; Dallas (Morning News), Minneapolis (Star Tribune) — they have their fair share of challenges, but they’re doing OK and doing a lot of good work and maintaining fairly significant staffs. In other places I think you see news organizations being treated like annuities; the effort is to just extract as much cash as possible out of them until they disappear. And I think we see that with some of the hedge funds that have acquired news organizations.
Mark Caro: That definitely feels like what’s going on with Alden. Do you need to be a philanthropic person to own a newspaper and keep it at a high quality at this point? Do you need to be willing to lose money to make it work journalistically?
Marty Baron: I don’t think that is or should be the future of news organizations, to expect to continue to lose money and to expect very wealthy people to want to lose money indefinitely. Anybody who thinks that’s the future, I think, is deluding himself or herself. The future of our business has to be to be able to support ourselves. There can be nonprofits. In some instances, news organizations should be able to count on philanthropic support from their communities in the same way that public radio stations have counted on the support of their communities. But for the most part, I think we’re going to have to figure out a commercially successful model.
There just isn’t enough philanthropic support in the country to support all the news organizations that need to exist. And on top of that, those of us who work in journalism should not expect that we should be charity cases and that we’re such a good cause that some wealthy person is going to want to continually lose money and that we exist solely to drain their bank account. I don’t think that there’s much of a future in that. And I don’t think that there are very many wealthy people who want to subject themselves to that either.
Mark Caro: At the Washington Post you worked under one of the very, very wealthy people in Jeff Bezos. The New York Times had a story a couple of days ago saying the Post is on pace to lose about $100 million in 2023. Is that a function of the cost of doing that level of journalism even at a place as successful as the Post, a sign that the economic model isn’t sustainable for the quality that it’s putting out?
Marty Baron: Well, I think that’s a bit of jumping to a conclusion there based on one year’s performance. I mean, the Post had six years of straight profitability under Bezos also—seems that people have forgotten about that. There were a couple of years of investment after he acquired the Post, and then we had six years of straight profitability. More recently, it’s had greater difficulties. We’ve seen greater difficulties throughout the media industry in the decline of the digital advertising market and perhaps a decline in interest post-Trump, etc. The Post is heavily focused on politics, so it bears the brunt of that to a greater extent, but we’ve seen that with other media outlets as well.
Also, they did have an investment year. Bezos did commit to investing a fair amount to expand their journalistic portfolio. In other organizations, they may be able to borrow or issue stock or things like that, but in a private company, you’re basically talking about the owner putting in his own cash to make an investment. That gets counted as a loss as well. They’re obviously having some significant financial challenges right now, but I don’t think that we should assess their entire prospects based on one year’s performance.
I think it’s important to remember that other news organizations, including the New York Times have had incredibly difficult periods. The New York Times had to actually go to a Mexican billionaire (Carlos Slim Helú) to raise money in the past. People were predicting in the past that BuzzFeed and Huffington Post would be forever ascendant while the New York Times and the Washington Post were in perpetual decline. That didn’t turn out to be the case. There’s a tendency in our business to look at something that happened in one limited period of time and extrapolate from that into the future, and I think that’s a huge mistake. One really ought to go back and look at all the terrible predictions that have been made by media pundits about our business, because it’s a pretty sorry record, frankly.
One really ought to go back and look at all the terrible predictions that have been made by media pundits about our business, because it’s a pretty sorry record, frankly.
— Marty Baron, former editor of the Washington Post
Mark Caro: I think there’s a widespread feeling that, aside from the Post and The New York Times, the business model for having a robust newsroom is broken, with some saying government support is needed to make it work, or you have to become a nonprofit, or there has to be something other than what has been the commercial model.
Marty Baron: Look, there are huge challenges in our business, and there’s a reason to be terribly concerned about it. On the other hand, I think the worst thing that we can do to ourselves is just be pessimists. Nobody will ever succeed by thinking they’re going to fail.
There are nonprofits that have found stability. Everybody points to the Texas Tribune, of course, but there are others out there. CalMatters has done pretty well in California, and there are other examples out there of nonprofits that seem to be holding their own. ProPublica has been able to raise significant sums of money to support a growing staff. Chalkbeat has done well covering education. And as I said, on the local front there are news organizations that are pretty stable right now, are doing reasonably well, have been able to do some very important, significant journalism. I don’t think that we should just give it up and say, well, it’s hopeless. I don’t think that’s the case.
By the way, I would mention that nonprofits are not immune from business considerations. It’s not like being a nonprofit immunizes you from having to make enough money in order to pay people’s salaries and to invest in the future, to invest in the technology that’s necessary and make the other necessary investments in the future. So just being nonprofit is not like some magic wand that that solves your economic problems. It doesn’t. But I think that there are actually signs of progress out there, and I think that we should focus on those as well and say: What is making them successful? How is it that they are able to sustain themselves and to continue to practice really effective journalism?
I do think that we, as a profession, tend to be overly pessimistic and not look at the successes and try to learn from those successes. That’s not being pollyannish and not pretending that we don’t have severe problems. We have huge problems in the industry, but if we want to succeed, I think we should try to look for models of success and learn from those. And I don’t think a model for success is to tell the world that we’re doing such important work that somebody needs to just come and support us, that it needs to be the government or it needs to be some rich person or it needs to be whatever. We need to figure out how to solve our own commercial problems. We can’t just be the damsel in distress all the time, saying, “Please help us help us. We’re beautiful. We’re wonderful. Come to our rescue.” There’s no future in that. And I don’t think that there’s going to be good enough taxpayer support for the idea that they should support the news industry, however we define it. And that’s the big question: How do you define the news industry? On top of that, if we truly want to maintain our independence, we can’t become a dependent. If we expect to be dependent on government, I don’t think we’re going to maintain our independence. All anybody needs to look at is what Trump did with Voice of America when he had control of it to be concerned about being largely dependent on government funding.
We can’t just be the damsel in distress all the time, saying, “Please help us help us. We’re beautiful. We’re wonderful. Come to our rescue.” There’s no future in that.
— Marty Baron
Mark Caro: When you arrived at the Globe, you focused on beefing up local reporting and local investigations. Then at the Post, there was an opportunity to have more of a national reach. So different solutions for different papers … .
Marty Baron: I don’t think that there’s always one model, and then everybody needs to follow that model. At the Globe, we were under enormous financial pressure. A lot of the revenue for the Globe had evaporated. We had to make some pretty significant decisions, pretty tough decisions, about where we were going to focus our efforts. Clearly, the value that we were adding for our readers, which was supported by the research that we did, was in covering our city and covering our region. People were not necessarily looking to the Globe to cover the world, to cover the country. They were looking for the Globe to cover the region and the city, so that’s where we focused our efforts.
We did have to shed staff by a significant amount, so we had to make some significant choices. And we did emphasize investigative reporting, I saw that people were willing to support that. They felt that if we didn’t do it, nobody would do it, and in many instances we were the only ones to be holding powerful institutions — government, private and nonprofit — accountable, and that when we did that work, they were willing to buy a subscription. So that’s the direction that we went.
Also, you may recall there was a time when people weren’t charging for digital access, and people were very skeptical of the idea that the pay model would work when the New York Times introduced it. A whole lot of media pundits said that it wasn’t going to work. But it did work. And we introduced that at the Boston Globe, which was then owned by the New York Times Company, and it also worked there, and it brought in a significant source of revenue. The Boston Globe today is doing pretty well when it comes to subscriptions, quite well in comparison to most news organizations, as far as I can tell.
At the Washington Post, it was a completely different situation. The Washington Post had been focused on its region. When Bezos came in, he felt that we had an opportunity to be national and even global. And we needed to reorient ourselves. We were based in the nation’s capital. We had the name the Washington Post. We had a heritage that went back to Watergate where even people who had never read the Washington Post recognized the name and recognized what it stood for. And a lot of that was shining light in dark corners and holding government accountable and holding power accountable. So that’s the direction that we went.
And we had an opportunity because we didn’t have to deliver physical paper all over the country or all over the world. All we had to do was sign somebody up for a digital subscription, so it’s much more cost-effective.
By the way, that highlights something that I think is important for us to think about as an industry, and that is, how do we significantly lower our costs? And what can we do with technology that previously required manual labor? We’ve done that as an industry over a period of time. You may remember we used to have composing rooms in this industry. They don’t exist anymore. There are a lot of areas where we have shed manual labor. So we need to think: How do we significantly lower our costs, and how do we take best advantage of technology? Just saying we need to reconstruct the old models of news organizations, that’s not much of an answer.
Mark Caro: When I started at the Chicago Tribune, we had reporters all over the world, a pretty big bureau in D.C., another one in Los Angeles, someone in Atlanta, and at some point, the Tribune Company bought Times Mirror and started down the road to where it is now. They closed some bureaus, combined some with the L.A. Times, like Washington’s, and when the L.A. Times split from the company, it got the bureaus, and the Tribune had no reporters based anywhere other than Chicago. Part of me felt like we’d been reduced, but was I just being nostalgic for a model that didn’t work anymore?
Marty Baron: Well, there is a lot of nostalgia in what you were just saying. I mean, people in Boston were nostalgic for what the Boston Globe had been. It had a substantial Washington bureau, but we maintained that Washington bureau actually, despite all the financial pressure. I did not reduce the size of the Washington bureau because I felt there was a strong connection between Boston, its universities, service and government, a policy orientation of people in Boston, etc. I thought there was a lot of connection with Washington, and there were a lot of things in Washington that we needed to cover, that had a huge impact on the Boston region and New England generally.
The foreign staff I had to eliminate. The Globe had a foreign staff since the Vietnam War, but it was clear in the research of our readers that while they were happy that we had foreign correspondents, it’s not why they bought the Boston Globe. They didn’t think they were getting extra value out of it over what they could get by reading, let’s say, the New York Times or what have you. So we needed to make a choice.
We make a mistake in this business by thinking no choices need to be made. There’s a budget, there’s only so much money available, and you have to decide, OK, am I going to put my eggs in this basket, or am I going to put my eggs in that basket, because I don’t have enough eggs to put them in every basket out there. So while people lament that you make these cuts, a choice needs to be made. And the people who run the organization — whether it’s the publisher or the owner or the editor or all of them working together, ideally — make a decision about what’s the strategic bet that you’re going to make.
Chicago deserves a really great paper. It’s a great city. It has a strong sense of identity. There’s plenty to cover there. There’s plenty of value to be added for readers. So I would hope and I would imagine that there’s a market for a really great newspaper that serves Chicago and the surrounding area. And then, you know, beyond coverage of Chicago proper, it’s like, what is it the Chicago Tribune should be doing in Washington? Where can they add value by having somebody in Washington? Having one more person cover the White House? Is that a real value, given how much coverage we already have at the White House? Or are there other things that the Chicago Tribune should be doing in Washington? Certainly covering your congressional delegation, I think, would be really important. I think it’s a real shame that regional newspapers have basically stopped covering their senators and covering their representatives in Congress. That’s a big mistake. I think the public wants us to do that, expects us to do that, and so to the extent that regional newspapers have sacrificed that, I think that’s a major error.
But in terms of trying to cover everything, does the Chicago Tribune need to have somebody in Ukraine? I don’t know. If you have to make choices, well, what’s the cost of having somebody in Ukraine? It’s expensive, by the way. Not only do you have one correspondent, but you have to have support for that correspondent in various ways. So is it better to have somebody there, or is it better to have that person covering something in Chicago? Those are the kinds of decisions that have to be made. We all would like to do everything, but we can’t. It’s the same in our own personal budgets. We have to decide OK, well, how much money do we have to spend, and what are we going to choose to do? We can’t do everything. You try to do everything, pretty soon you’ll be declaring personal bankruptcy. So make a choice.