Monocle, December 2016 / January 2017
Marty Baron is a firm believer in the high altar of journalism, the kind that shuns click bait and saccharine stories about fluffy animals. Although the executive editor of The Washington Post doesn’t give away too much during interviews, one can sense that palpable notion of journalism in its purest form – as a societal pillar – coursing through his veins as he speaks in considered sentences. “Holding powerful individuals and institutions accountable is, I’d say, the highest purpose of journalism,” he says, leaning back in an office chair at the paper’s downtown headquarters.
Grey-haired, with a stubbly beard and his shirtsleeves rolled up, Baron is every inch the newspaper man. And the 62-year-old’s illustrious career – 40 years in newspapers and 17 as a top editor – reflects it. During that time he has worked for all the major “legacy newspapers”, as he calls them, starting at The Miami Herald in his native Florida, before migrating to the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The Boston Globe and finally the Post, which he has stewarded since the beginning of 2013. Highly respected within the industry, he has earnt display cases’ worth of Pulitzer prizes, from helping oversee the Spotlight investigative team’s uncovering of sexual abuse at the heart of the Catholic church in Boston at the start of the millennium – made into an Oscar-winning film – to the Post’s decision to run with Barton Gellman’s National Security Agency story thanks to files supplied by a certain Edward Snowden.
Yet despite being a decorated alumnus of traditional journalism – and its one-time torchbearer – Baron is also, by his own account, something of an anomaly. “I seem to be an odd creature in the sense that how is it possible that someone who was so steeped in traditional newspaper journalism could be leading an organisation that has made such tremendous digital progress?” That digital leap traces its roots back to an October day in 2013 when Jeff Bezos – consumer mogul and Amazon billionaire – announced that he would be buying the newspaper for $250m (€228m). It was a watershed moment, bringing down the hammer on 80 years of family ownership by the Graham clan.
Bezos has undoubtedly ushered in a new era at the Post – a heritage publication but one that had been in steady decline – and has pushed the editorial floor to exploit the intersection between technology and journalism, while buffing up the paper’s online presence. Under his ownership the newsroom has added about 140 staff, many of them “engineers” working alongside traditional journalists, which has resulted in a sharp uptick in web traffic.
While Bezos’s arrival may not have been a Damascene moment for Baron, he recognises that he is in “the reality business” and that change was inevitable. Not that he’s sure what the precise future model for running a news organisation might be. “Is it unsettling?” he asks. “Sure. It would be great if there were all sorts of certainty in our business and it was in many ways like it used to be. But that world no longer exists.”
Having a backer such as Bezos sitting atop an organisation does come with its advantages nonetheless and, while his pockets may not be bottomless, they’re certainly deep. His endowment has given the Post the luxury of having what Bezos calls a “runway” to take risks and be experimental – and arguably more so than its rivals.
Baron explains that Bezos isn’t a “personal charity” and the ultimate goal is to figure out how to make the newspaper “sustainable”. Yet while Bezos is certainly exigent, the Post’s executive editor is insistent that the new owner stays out of news. “I’ve never had a story idea from him,” he says. “He doesn’t insert himself into the day-to-day journalism.” Rather, he’s there to offer ideas on tactics and strategy, regularly speaking with senior executives and hosting planning sessions from his Seattle base a couple of times a year.
While The Washington Post may be striding out in bold new directions, Baron isn’t ready to torch the fundaments of traditional journalism just yet. He is still firmly wedded to the need for investigative reporting. The Post is steeped in the tradition thanks to Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein and their exposure of the Watergate scandal.
Baron calls probing reports “absolutely core to our mission”, something that was reinforced during the recent presidential campaign. Indeed he doesn’t buy into the notion that the press failed to investigate Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton – and least of all the Post. He cites Trump’s decision to revoke the paper’s press credentials at one point as proof that it was ruffling feathers – or at least that yellow mat of hair. “It’s not that we didn’t take Trump seriously,” he says. “I think that we failed as a profession to detect the depth of grievance in society that led to Donald Trump in the first place.”
Wary but accepting of the ever-faster speed of the daily news cycle, Baron sees no reason why quality control should be sacrificed, even if it’s sometimes the undesired result of feeding the online breaking-news beast. But he appears almost wounded talking about the vitriol unfurled against the media – unwarranted in his opinion – during the most populist moments of the election and the “you’re either with us or you’re with the terrorists” attitudes seeping into a polarised US society.
Almost as serious as his portrayal in Spotlight – making him tip back his head and laugh at one point during the interview feels like a major victory – Baron seems most at ease when he’s in an unassuming role, sticking to script and avoiding the first person. He looks visibly uncomfortable when asked about what makes him a top editor and calls the resulting interest in him following the film’s success “awkward”. But good did come out of it, he confesses. “It has inspired a lot of young people to go into journalism, which I think is fantastic.” Now they too can get on with the job in hand: holding those powerful individuals and institutions to account.