Your Source for NPR News & Music
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

Baron Named Executive Editor At 'Washington Post'

LINDA WERTHEIMER, HOST:

There's also a change in leadership at The Washington Post. The paper's executive editor, Marcus Brauchli, stepped aside yesterday and Marty Baron, editor of the Boston Globe, will take over in the new year.

As NPR's David Folkenflik reports, Baron takes over a proud franchise with major financial problems and challenges in adapting to the digital world.

DAVID FOLKENFLIK, BYLINE: At the Globe, Marty Baron already leads a prominent paper with a distinguished record, but he said this is an opportunity he simply couldn't pass up.

MARTY BARON: There's scarcely a journalist of my generation who didn't aspire to go to The Washington Post.

FOLKENFLIK: The Post boasted star power for years after the Watergate scandal, but the newest top editor will have to surmount the more mundane challenges of falling revenues and paid circulation. Baron says he will maintain its historic strengths.

BARON: It's always done ambitious journalism. It's inspired others to do the same, and it plays such a distinctive and defining role in its coverage of politics, its coverage of policy, its coverage of world affairs and I think, not to be forgotten, its coverage of its own community.

FOLKENFLIK: The paper had been insulated from profit pressures by the Graham family's wealth and pride in its journalism, and subsidized by the success of its corporate siblings. But publisher Katherine Weymouth has placed a premium on cutting costs and creating a profitable model for the paper - even as it spends money to pursue new digital readers and to ward off new competitors.

Again, Marty Baron.

BARON: You know, a lot of people are doing incremental work, they're doing what happened today, rumors or incremental developments of one type or another. And I think news organizations like The Post, and I hope the Globe over the last 11 years, have tried to dig deeper and to do more penetrating stories.

FOLKENFLIK: Marcus Brauchli is to become a corporate vice president focusing on new media.

David Folkenflik, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.

David Folkenflik was described by Geraldo Rivera of Fox News as "a really weak-kneed, backstabbing, sweaty-palmed reporter." Others have been kinder. The Columbia Journalism Review, for example, once gave him a "laurel" for reporting that immediately led the U.S. military to institute safety measures for journalists in Baghdad.
Related Stories