Martin Baron, former executive editor of the Washington Post, managed the newsroom during a decade of incredible change and shifting views about the media and truth. Baron led his team through a tumultuous time, as they covered everything from the Trump presidency, to the covid pandemic, to the Black Lives Matter movement. Along the way, he learned some important lessons about managing a public-facing company while remaining true to its purpose and mission. He speaks with HBR editor-in-chief Adi Ignatius.
CURT NICKISCH: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review, I’m Curt Nickisch.
Leading a publicly facing company, has its own set of challenges. Heightened scrutiny, a fast pace of change, and many stakeholders to keep happy. That’s particularly true for the news media, especially at a time like this. Newsroom leaders across the U.S. and the world are trying to adapt while they remain true to their mission to tell the facts, to write that first draft of history.
Today’s guest was the executive editor over much of the last decade at a major news organization with global reach. It’s a decade that included an unprecedented U.S. presidency, new attacks on the news media, a pandemic, as well as a reckoning around race and inequality in the United States.
Marty Baron joined the Washington Post in 2013, which was soon after bought by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. Prior to that, Baron had been the executive editor at The Boston Globe, where his team won a Pulitzer prize for its reporting on the Catholic Church sex abuse scandal, coverage which inspired the movie Spotlight. Baron stepped down from his role at the Post earlier this year, and he shares a number of leadership lessons he gained throughout his career.
Here is Marty Baron in conversation with HBR editor and chief Adi Ignatius.
ADI IGNATIUS: So Marty, thank you very much for being with us.
MARTY BARON: Thanks for having me.
ADI IGNATIUS: So the past four or five years seem to be as intense as any that I can remember as a producer and consumer of news media. Did you feel that way from your position at the Post?
MARTY BARON: No question. I mean, I think that our news organization was under tremendous pressure in a lot of different ways. Certainly the level of news was very intense. It was continuous nonstop and incredibly important. And then of course we were being attacked regularly by the president of the United States, most powerful person on earth. And we had to deal with that as well as the pressure that came from his avid followers.
ADI IGNATIUS: Well, let’s talk about that. How did you balance the desire that I would imagine you have, we all have to bestow respect on the presidency versus the reality of a president who ignored many of the norms that were part of that consideration?
MARTY BARON: I think we approached it in our traditional way. That we understand he’s president of the United States. He was elected. We respect that process, of course, and we tried to cover him as we would cover any other president. And with any president, we believe that core to our mission is holding power to account. That was true of the previous president, it was true of Donald Trump and it remains true of Joe Biden. And we viewed him as a president whom we should cover in the way that we cover other presidents.
ADI IGNATIUS: So how do you manage your own political leanings? The past several years have shown nobody is neutral, but how do you lead a team that’s meant to pursue as you say the truth and not a political line when all of us are humans with strong political feelings of our own?
MARTY BARON: I’ve been doing that for 45 years. I feel like a lawyer who can represent anybody or a doctor who treats anybody. I think that journalists can cover anyone if they approach it in the correct way. I just keep those things in check. And I always try to look at things from the perspective of the people where we’re covering and assess whether we’re doing a fair job. And I think fairness means fairness to the subject, the individuals we’re covering, but also fairness to the public in terms of telling them what is really going on. I think that’s our obligation.
ADI IGNATIUS: So we’re at a strange point in our history where on the one hand fake news, alternate facts are competing in the traditional news space. And then you have this aggressive sort of cancel culture that’s unforgiving I’d say even toward well-intentioned mistakes, how do leaders, how do editors walk that line these days?
MARTY BARON: Well, look, I mean, we have at the Washington Post, we have a staff of about a thousand journalists. We have that staff because we believe we need that in order to do a proper job of reporting and editing. There’s never been and there currently isn’t any effort to spread information that is false in any way, of course, we recognize that we’re imperfect, all journalists are imperfect in the same way that all humans are imperfect, we make mistakes. And when you make those mistakes, we seek to correct those mistakes. And we have a policy about doing that. That’s the approach that we take.
ADI IGNATIUS: Do you worry about that truth or that facts have become, or could become a casualty of the current culture of, “What I say goes”?
MARTY BARON: Yeah, I do. I worry a lot about it. Certainly during the past four years, there’s been an effort on the part of the administration to undermine the very idea of objective truth and objective fact. Early on in the administration, Kellyanne Conway talked about, “You have your facts. We have alternative facts.” And it sounded laughable at the time, but it’s not so laughable today. That there has been a determined effort to try to obliterate the very idea of objective truth and to convey to the former President’s followers and to the public generally, that the only true thing is what the president says it is, even though it was often completely untrue.
I don’t think that’s unique by the way, to the right or to the president. I think there is now an effort on the part of people of all ideological views to say, you have your truth. I have my truth and I reject that idea. The core principle of the Washington Post, it’s actually the first principle pull of the Washington Post when you walk in the door and that is to tell the truth as nearly as the truth may be ascertained. And that recognizes that getting at the truth is a process, it’s difficult, it’s hard, there are many obstacles, but that we should strive to do that. And that there is such a thing as truth, that there is such a thing as a fact. And it’s not a matter of you have your truth. I have my truth. It’s just a matter of your life experience or a matter of your personal perspective. I flatly reject that idea.
ADI IGNATIUS: So what do we do about that? I mean, that seems sensible, but it seems that people really are in their separate corners, interpreting things, their separate ways. And in my lowest moments, I despair that we may never get back to a point where we can even accept what the facts are.
MARTY BARON: I wish I had a ready answer for you. I’ve been thinking about it a lot. Sometimes this is portrayed as a problem for the press and it is a problem for the press, but it’s not only a problem for the press. It’s a problem for society as a whole, because if we cannot agree on a common set of facts, it’s hard to imagine how we can have a functioning democracy. Of course, we should disagree on our analysis of the problems and how to address those problems and what the policies should be. That’s the nature of a democracy, but fundamentally we have to agree on a common set of facts. And it was, the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who talked about, “You’re entitled to your own opinions, but you’re not entitled to your own facts.”
And yet now people believe that they aren’t entitled to their own facts. And that’s true on the left and on the right, I believe. How we solve for that, I honestly don’t know. I mean, from the standpoint of the press, I think we have to show more of our work. We have to show videos if they’re available, we have to show original documents if they’re available, we annotate them in a way that we point people to what we’re talking about, but keep in mind, I mean, if you just look at the events of January 6th, the attack on the Capitol, there is still a large segment of the population today that will argue that this was Antifa, that was attacking the Capitol.
And there’s no evidence it was Antifa attacking to the Capitol, all of the people, the 350 or so people who’ve been arrested were big supporters of the president. And there were a substantial number of them, not all of them, but a substantial number were members of extremist groups. So you would think that constitutes that people can judge the facts based on what they see and what is actually happened, the objective reality. And yet people continue to characterize it in a way that is completely divorced from the facts.
ADI IGNATIUS: So Jeff Bezos was the owner of the Post during most of the years that you were there. What would your advice be to another editor who’s working for someone of that profile, a well-heeled owner who’s a relative novice to the business?
MARTY BARON: Well, that’s a tough question. They’re all different. They’re not all the same and let’s keep in mind that just because you’re well-heeled doesn’t mean you’re the same as somebody else’s well-heeled. The good thing about Jeff Bezos is that he does do his research. He does listen. He does look at the data. He’s open. He recognizes what he doesn’t know. And he came into the Post realizing that there was a lot about the news business that he didn’t know. He did know a lot about technology. And he does know a lot about that. And he doesn’t know a lot about consumer behavior given that he runs a very large consumer business, but he did not know a lot about coverage of news. He’s learned a bit more about it. And I think that he’s opened always to learning more about it.
So what I would encourage editors to do is to try to school new owners as best they can in the way that the business works. How it’s in my view, quite different from other products. I think it’s not a consumer product. It is a consumer product, but it’s more than that. It is a relationship. Our customers feel they have a relationship with a news organization with a newspaper. So it’s more complicated. And I think one has to cultivate that relationship. They have to know what we stand for. They have to feel a sense of they’re supporting a mission in addition to buying a product.
ADI IGNATIUS: So you have been rightly celebrated for the years that you spent at the Washington Post. Are there things you got wrong or things that you’re not proud of that you wish you could do over?
MARTY BARON: I’m sure there are. I’m not sure I want to enumerate them all for you to tell you the truth. I mean, look, I came in for criticism on a variety of fronts as well. I think that’s only to be expected for anybody who’s in a leadership position. The one that I think about the most really is whether we did enough to diversify the staff as quickly as we should have. I personally felt very strongly committed to that. I felt that I had worked hard at that wherever I’ve been.
And yet there was a view, particularly in the year 2020 with the protests over racial justice, there was a feeling within our own newsroom and a reckoning within our own newsroom. And the message was that we had not done enough. And so I accept that criticism. I think we had to work harder and I guess I wish we had worked harder. I felt that we were working hard, but undoubtedly, there’s more that we could have done.
And we did take concrete steps over the course of the year to address that. We named a managing editor for diversity and inclusion. And that’s not just in terms of hiring, but in terms of our coverage. We dedicated a dozen positions to coverage of race, ethnicity, and identity. And when I left, all but one of those was filled and we also stated that those positions were not the totality of our commitment to that kind of coverage, that this coverage would be part of everybody’s portfolio. So when I look back, obviously I think that I needed to do more.
ADI IGNATIUS: You’ve had some run ins with your staff. Most editors have about their use of social media. And I’m not going to talk about individual cases because that’s probably tricky to do, but it does seem to be aligned that’s shifting every day in terms of the comfort that managers, the editors have with their staff using social media, how they use social media. So I guess my question is where did you end up in terms of what you think reporters can and cannot do on social?
MARTY BARON: Well, the standards today are the same as they were when I was there. It’s quite possible that those standards will be rewritten over the coming year. You’ll probably await a successor to be involved in that. My own view is that journalists need to exercise care and restraint in their use of social media in the same way that we exercise care and restraint in what we publish as our stories, as our journalism. At the Post, we have editors for our stories. W e have principles. We have standards, we have practices, we apply all of those in our journalism. And we insist upon the same standards for individuals when they appear on television, when they appear on radio. And we don’t provide an exemption for social media, just because it’s social media.
So while I do believe that journalists can show more of their personality, they can show wit, they can provide extra insights. All of that. I don’t think that it’s an opportunity for people to simply express their opinions or every feeling they have and to express them impulsively. I think they need to be their own editors. Clearly we can’t have editors for every tweet that somebody puts out. And that means that individuals need to edit themselves, to think a little bit about what they’re putting out there rather than just tweeting impulsively.
ADI IGNATIUS: There are probably some generational issues at play here. And I’m wondering, did you find it a challenge to manage a kind of younger generation that seems to have different attitudes toward the world, different attitudes toward social media, different attitudes towards almost everything?
MARTY BARON: Well, managing is a challenge always. Just managing other people is a huge challenge. But I do believe that there is a generational shift in regard to social media. And there are older people on the staff, not necessarily old, but older people on the staff who believe in and adhere to traditional standards. And by the way, there are younger people who adhere to those standards as well. But there is a sentiment among many younger people that the standards should be far looser, or in fact that there should be no standards whatsoever. And I understand where people are coming from. I think that people have felt very personally affected by what’s happened over the last four years, particularly when it comes to matters of race and ethnicity. And some of the very offensive things that have happened in our society. And people have felt those very personally. And I get that.
But I think that it’s really important that we maintain the credibility of our institution and that none of us should do anything to undermine that credibility. Look, many of the young people who’ve come to the Post, for example, have come because of the reputation of that institution. That’s why they’re there. That’s why they wanted to join the Post. I think we need to think through what established that reputation? What was the basis for that reputation? And it was what I’ve talked about before the principles, standards and practices that we have had. So the Post is not just, and no newsroom is just a platform for people to express their views, a platform for people to draw attention to themselves.
All of us, all the time need to keep in mind that our primary responsibility is to advance the interests of the institution to protect the reputation of the institution. Our job is in the news department is to get the facts, put it in proper context, tell the public what we’ve learned in an unflinching way and what we do in our journalism by the way, happens to be far more powerful than any tweet that anybody could possibly send out.
ADI IGNATIUS: So you’ve had success at several publications and you’ve had a long and impressive career. I’m going to ask this in a sort of glib way, but I will. What is your superpower? How have you managed to do this?
MARTY BARON: Well, I don’t have a super power, that’s first of all. I mean, I think I do try to draw upon the talents of the entire staff. It’s certainly not a one man show. I don’t treat it that way. It’s not about me. It’s not about my ego. It’s not about me having all of the ideas. Frankly, it’s a bit of crowdsourcing, we all talk about crowdsourcing and we have the opportunity to do that when we are managers. I draw upon the great ideas and the great talents of the people I work with. And that’s an amazing reservoir of talent and opportunity for us. So I try to create conditions that allow people to do their best work. I try to provide an overall direction. I try to set overall standards and then I try to draw enough people one way or the other, their best work. And that’s what I try to do.
ADI IGNATIUS: Well, let me push you on that a little bit. Because just stepping back and letting the team do their thing, anybody can do that, but it seems like you were actually successful in bringing out the best in people. So how do you do that? I mean, is it a matter of inspiring people one-on-one? Working with teams? Drawing up a plan?
MARTY BARON: I’m not entirely sure actually. I try to set overall direction. I try to set high ambitions. I try to talk about the goals that we should be achieving. So for example, I try to recommend stories that we ought to do that are highly ambitious. I think that people draw conclusions from that. They can interpret what they see happening. So when I got to The Boston Globe in 2001, we embarked on an investigation of the Catholic church. And I think that people saw at that moment that there was no sacred cow. That we were willing to investigate the most powerful institution in all of New England. And that meant we would investigate power of any type.
And the same was true when I came to the Post. One of the early stories that we pursued, was the NSA story, the leaks by Edward Snowden. And this was highly sensitive material. And obviously it was controversial what we did, but we were willing to pursue that story because we felt that there was an overriding public interest at stake. So I think that people understood that we were going to do tough stories, that we were going to do ambitious stories, and I encourage people to do that. And we put resources behind that.
ADI IGNATIUS: Are there lessons that you tried to impart to people on your team in terms of how to do it the right way? You talked to me about some of this.
MARTY BARON: Yeah, I always encourage people to be more impressed with what they don’t know than with what they do know or what they think they know. I think our job as journalists is to be constant learners, to recognize that there’s always one more question that we could ask that would tell us more and that to some degree, we’re looking at the world through a keyhole and there’s much more that we need to know. And so I encourage people to be intellectually curious, to have some humility about the information that is in our possession and to keep learning.
ADI IGNATIUS: And how do you deal with the stress? And particularly the past few years, but not just the last few years – the constant stress of news’ journalism.
MARTY BARON: It’s tough. I don’t know. I guess I dealt with it by retiring, but at 66, I don’t really know. I mean, I go for walks. I go for hikes. I ride my bike. One of those stressful periods for me was when I was at The Boston Globe. And it looked like The New York Times Company, which was the parent company of the globe at the time might shut it down in 2008 or 2009 during the great recession. And that was very stressful. I didn’t want to be an editor of a newspaper at the time, that it was shut down. I didn’t want to be known for that. I didn’t want to be deemed responsible for that since I didn’t think that I was responsible for that. And so I went to a second home that I had, a small second home I had at the time and went on long hikes, went on bike rides, enjoyed the fresh air, just got away from people.
ADI IGNATIUS: So you’re only 66. What would you like to do for your next act?
MARTY BARON: Well, I have to figure that out. I mean, I would like to be a voice for journalism. I would like to be a voice for the standards that I believe in. I believe the public has taken journalism for granted for too long. And I think that journalists have taken the public for granted for too long. And I think that we can’t do that. I don’t think the public can take journalism for granted because if they do, we won’t have it. And if we don’t have a free and independent press, we will not have a democracy. There’s never been a democracy without a free and independent press. When you don’t have that, you won’t have free expression itself. And then I believe that journalists have sort of taken our customer base if you want to call it that for granted, the public for granted, the assumption is that if we do good work, people will just be there.
And I don’t think that it’s true. I think that we need to explain ourselves better. We need to talk about what our mission is. We needed to talk about why there is a free press in this country. We need to talk about how we go about our work. We need to be more transparent about our methods. We need to be more transparent about ourselves, who we are. There are the incredible, ridiculous stereotypes of who journalists are. We all come from some elite college, we all grew up on the east coast. We all grew up in privileged circumstances, whatever it might be, and that’s just nonsense. It’s not true at all. So I think that there’s a lot of communication that needs to take place. And in some fashion I would like to be part of that.
ADI IGNATIUS: Well, I wish you luck with those next steps, and I really appreciate you taking the time to talk to us. Thank you Marty.
MARTY BARON: Thanks Adi. Appreciate it.
CURT NICKISCH: That’s Marty Baron, former executive editor of the Washington Post. He was interviewed by Harvard Business Review editor and chief Adi Ignatius. For more leadership content, please subscribe to the HBR leadership newsletter. That’s at hbr.org/email-newsletters.
This episode was produced by Mary Dooe. We get technical help from Rob Eckhardt. Adam Buchholz is our audio product. Thanks for listening to the HBR Ideacast, I’m Curt Nickisch.