Marty Baron and a turning point for the Washington Post

Yesterday, Marty Baron announced that hes retiring as editor of the Washington Post, effective at the end of February. Baron arrived at the Post eight years ago after spells as executive editor at the Miami Herald and the Boston Globe (the latter immortalized by Liev Schreiber in Spotlight). In that time, the Post won ten Pulitzer prizes, was bought out by the billionaire Jeff Bezos, roughly doubled the size of its newsroom (which is still expanding), and adapted to the demands of the internet; the paper now has around three million digital subscribers, more than triple its 2016 total. Its long been rumored in media circles that Baron planned to step down sometime after the 2020 election. Yesterday, he told Paul Farhi, a media reporter at the Post, that his job is exhausting, and that hes ready to move on. With the internet being so big a part of it, its twenty-four/seven, three-sixty-five, Baron said. It means you never really get to disconnect.

In the hours after his announcement, tributes to Barons leadership poured in. Barton Gellman, a former national-security reporter at the Post (who is now at The Atlantic), praised Barons handling, in 2013, of the secrets that Edward Snowden leaked about the National Security Agency and shared with Gellman and others. I remember thinking he might throw me out of his office when I laid out my outlandish conditionsa windowless room, a heavy safe, encrypted email and so onfor bringing the Snowden documents to the Post, Gellman told Farhi, but every choice he made came from a place of courage and common sense and journalistic integrity. (That wouldnt be the last big national-security story that Baron would shepherd: in 2019, the Post published the Afghanistan Papers, a huge project revealing the deceptions behind Americas longest war. Thanks to the Trump news cycle, it did not get the sustained attention it deserved.) Jason Rezaian, a Post reporter who spent more than five-hundred days in jail in Iran, hailed Baron, who worked to secure his release, as a tireless advocate in public and behind closed doors. Dean Baquet, the executive editor of the New York Times, who had a friendly rivalry with Baron, said he made every institution he touched better. Margaret Sullivan, a media critic at the Post, called Baron a truly outstanding editor and said that American citizens owe him a standing ovation. Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at NYU, argued that during the Trump era, Baron made the Post a more essential read than the Times. I agree.

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Not that everything has gone smoothly for Baronin recent months, in particular, the Post has had to reckon with newsroom tensions around issues of race, representation, and the treatment of its staff. A year ago this week, Baron suspended Felicia Sonmez, a politics reporter at the paper, and upbraided her for a real lack of judgment after she tweeted (innocuously) about a past rape allegation against the basketball star Kobe Bryant in the hours after Bryant was killed in a helicopter crash. Hundreds of Sonmezs colleagues signed a letter supporting her, accusing Post management of seeking repeatedly to control Sonmezs speech on sexual violence, and of failing to protect her after her Bryant tweet triggered a wave of threats and abuse against her. A few days later, Sonmez was reinstated; Baron pledged a review of the Posts social-media policies, but did not apologize. This was not an isolated incident: around the same time, the Daily Beasts Maxwell Tani reported that Baron had also censured Wesley Lowery, a Pulitzer prize-winning Post journalist, over his tweets about media coverage of race. At the time, Lowery did not directly address the story, but did tweet asking, Whats the point of bringing diverse experiences and voices into a room only to muzzle them? He has since left the Post for CBS, and been a leading voice in the industry-wide debate about the meaning of objectivity. (Yesterday, Lowery tweeted a smiley face twenty minutes after Barons retirement was confirmed.)

Last April, the findings of a report about the Posts social-media policies circulated internally; it concluded, based on interviews with staff, that management may be quicker to forgive the indiscretions of white men and newsroom stars than those of women, minorities, and less high-profile reporters. Such inequities havent been limited to social media. In 2019, the Posts union conducted a pay study and found that women and people of color in the newsroom earned less than white men; last summer, a number of Black journalists who had left the Post spoke out, online and in interviews with Ben Smith, the media columnist at the Times, about what they perceived to be barriers to their professional advancement at the paper. This place just seems to run off its best people, Soraya Nadia McDonald, who left the Post for The Undefeated, a site owned by ESPN, told Smith. (In the same, mammoth story on tensions at the paper, Smith reported that Baron killed a story that Bob Woodward wanted to run outing the then-Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh as a liar, and was left infuriated by an article the Post ran about people getting high before watching the movie Cats, which he felt glorified recreational drug use.) The Post has since filled new editorial roles focused on raceincluding the post of managing editor for diversity and inclusion that was filled by Krissah Thompson, a veteran of the paperbut, as Business Insiders Steven Perlberg reported recently, numerous Post staffers feel that the internal reckoning is incomplete. In his exit note, Baron acknowledged that, despite progress, the Post still needs a wider diversity of life experiences and backgrounds represented in our newsroom and reflected in our coverage.

Barons departure doesnt just come at a natural inflection point in the national political news cycle, but at a moment of philosophical introspection for the news business. The calls for a new approach by Lowery and others have often been caricatured, by traditionalists, as a capitulation of rigor and fairness to subjectivity and opinion, but in reality, rigor is central to the reformers visionrecognizing the flawed assumptions of the old model of objectivity isnt inimical to hard-hitting journalism, but should bolster it. The Post isnt the only outlet to have initiated a changing of the guard since this broader conversation started, but it is the most powerful to be seeking a new top editor, and the paper now has an opportunity to prove that righting the errors of Barons approach will only strengthen his legacy as an editorial powerhouse. As Smith noted last year, Barons tenure has been defined by a steadfast adherence to the longstanding rules of newspaper journalism and the defense of the institution. I wrote at the time that assessing the merit and continued relevance of those rules requires seeing them as separate from the institution. That will soon be someone elses job.

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