Q&A: Marty Baron on pursuing facts in a time of lies

This article was originally published on Northwestern University’s Medill Local News Initiative website and is republished here with permission.

Second of two parts

Marty Baron led The Washington Post through a period of dramatic change. Not only did billionaire Amazon founder Jeff Bezos buy the newspaper months into Baron’s eight-year tenure as executive editor, but President Donald Trump declared the press to be “the enemy of the people” and, with allies outside and inside the media, worked to undermine trust in mainstream news outlets as well as in facts themselves.

Yet while the economics of running an aggressive news operation grew more challenging, the Post expanded its newsroom, ambitions and readership. By the time Baron retired in February 2021, his newsrooms had won 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.

In this, part 2 of our conversation, Baron, 68, looks ahead at ways in which news operations can attract talented journalists, earn the public’s trust, overcome challenges in the social-media landscape and find a way to use paywalls and artificial intelligence intelligently.

The following has been edited for clarity and concision.

• • •

Mark Caro: The idea behind the Post’s slogan “Democracy Dies in Darkness” is that bringing problems to light makes society better. With Trump’s calling the press “the enemy of the people” and the continued erosion of trust in the media, do you feel like that has damaged the ability of news outlets to shed light on wrongdoing and to make a difference? A significant portion of the country finds lies more credible than what The New York Times or Washington Post reports.

Marty Baron: Obviously, that’s a huge challenge. I think one of the greatest challenges to our business is that we don’t share a common set of facts. And it’s even worse than that, that we can’t even agree on how to establish that something is a fact. What are the elements that are needed for that? It used to be that we relied on education, expertise, experience and evidence. I throw out these four E’s. Now all of those have been devalued, including eyewitness evidence. So that’s a huge challenge for the business.

But I think we need to be more transparent. We need to show our evidence more clearly. I don’t think we will necessarily persuade everybody, but we can persuade people at the margins, and countries move in this direction or that based on whether a portion of the population moves in this direction or that. I think we have seen that a lot of people believe in unhinged conspiracy theories, but there are also a lot of people who have been convinced by the facts, as long as we can provide the evidence. And we should stick to that. We need to show more of it. We need to show more of our work. I think we need to demonstrate time and again that we’re trying to do an honest, objective job in our work. And I’m confident that will have an impact over time.

Mark Caro: Major platforms for pushing stories out to the public — like Twitter and Facebook — are being controlled by a few people and their backers, who have their own apparent agendas. Is that a significant issue?

Marty Baron: Well, I’m not a fan of how Elon Musk is running Twitter by any means, but it hasn’t prevented news organizations from posting their stories on Twitter. News organizations can continue to post their stories on Facebook, on Instagram, on Reddit, on Threads or Bluesky or wherever it is they want to put them. Stories will find their way across the Internet today reasonably well. It’s really important, though, that we get people to come to us directly, that they want to come to their local newspaper, that they want to go to The Washington Post, to The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal or a nonprofit or whatever it might be — that they have confidence in us as news providers, that they come to us directly and read us directly and are willing to pay for our coverage as well because it costs us money to provide that coverage. So we have to demonstrate our value time and time again. We can’t just assume that people will believe that we have value.

But it’s interesting to me that when there’s a natural disaster, people go to the tried and true. Then they do trust us. Something catastrophic happens — whether it’s a hurricane, a tornado, an earthquake, fires, mudslides, mass killings, whatever it might be — where are people going to look for information that they can trust? They go to the traditional news organizations. They don’t go to these fly-by-night news sites that traffic in conspiracy theories. Maybe eventually some of them will start to gravitate to those sites because they’re drawn to conspiracy theories, but it’s not the majority. It’s not the majority of people by any means.

There’s a long history of conspiracy thinking in the United States, and pretty much at any one moment, you can find maybe a third of the people in this country believe in some bizarre conspiracy theory. And that’s been the case for a very long period of time.

Mark Caro: I do feel, though, that 10 years ago when a big news outlet came out with an investigation laying out evidence of wrongdoing, the reaction was “This person did this horrible thing, and they have to resign.” Now more people are being exposed for having done terrible stuff yet stay in office and say, “No, I didn’t do that,” or “It doesn’t matter.”

Marty Baron: It is harder, no question, because the media environment’s more politicized than it ever has been. You have Fox News today in a way that you didn’t have before, and now you have outlets that are even to the right of Fox News, which are making a play for that segment of the public. And they traffic in conspiracy theories, and they are highly politicized. That didn’t exist, for example, at the time of Nixon. You had three major networks. The New York Times, The Washington Post, they weren’t national publications, by the way. They weren’t being circulated nationally at the time. The networks were the national distribution system, and radio. But now you have this countervailing force, which is a segment of the media that traffics in conspiracy theories, and that makes it ever more difficult. And society’s more polarized, media is more politicized, so it’s more challenging, no question.

I don’t think we should throw up our hands in despair. I think we should just try to work to figure out how do we be as effective as we possibly can be? How do we convince another 5%, how do we convince another 10% that what we’re saying is true? I don’t think we’re going to convince 100% ever, and maybe we never have. But I think we need to focus on how do we persuade another 5% of the readership or the public, another 10% of the public that we’re doing our work, we’re doing it honestly, this is really true, you should be concerned about this.

Mark Caro: People getting hired by a newspaper used to assume they could have a long career there. Now there’s such a feeling of doom and gloom about the news industry. Is there the pipeline of young, enthusiastic talent coming up to take those jobs, or is it harder to sort of find that talent because people think, oh, I’m not going to be able to make money in journalism anymore because the industry’s in the toilet?

Marty Baron: Some really talented people are going into the field, thankfully. I get encouraged when I see the caliber of people who are entering the field and encouraged that they continue to do so. Yes, I think that there are people who say, “Well, gee, I can’t make a career out of it.” There are parents of those kids who say, “You can’t go into that field because you’re not going to make a decent living.” On the other hand, there are plenty of really good people who are getting into the field because they feel a strong attachment to the mission. That’s really encouraging. And the reality is that the field will change.

I think the last thing students in college should be doing is depending on the advice of their parents about what the career of the future is. You know, there are a lot of people who have gone into software engineering, and they discover that well, those jobs were outsourced to countries overseas or are now going to be done by generative AI. There were a lot of people who went into law school, thinking, oh, well, that’s a reputable profession, and you can make a good living at that. Now there’s a surfeit of lawyers. So I don’t know that we can predict what the field of the future is.

I think there is a future for media. I think there’s a future for news coverage, as long as we have a democracy. And I think we need news coverage in order to maintain the democracy that we have. It’s just the nature of it is going to change. I think that there are going to be different kinds of news organizations. Even as we speak, new ones have been created and continue to be created. Will they be successful? That remains to be seen, but there’s just a lot of disruption in the field. Eventually, you know, we’ll figure it out.

Other fields experienced disruption, too. I think we forget about that. Look at the streaming business right now. Obviously, there were a lot of streaming outfits out there, and now, you know, they’re struggling for subscribers, because how many streaming subscriptions can any one person purchase? The music industry has gone through enormous disruption. The legal field has gone through disruption. Now look at all the people in the tech industry who are losing their jobs. Every field is going to experience disruption as a result of technology. For better or for worse, our industry was there ahead of a lot of others. But there are new sites that are being created. There are new opportunities being created. So I think for young people who feel a sense of mission, who are willing and able to adapt to the changes that take place and aren’t hobbled by a nostalgia for the way things used to be, they will succeed.

I think as an industry — and I’ve said this to God knows how many people — if we keep talking about the way things used to be, we’re going to be what used to be. We need to figure out what needs to be. What needs to be done in our business for the future? How do we achieve that? And what kinds of skills do we need? What kinds of changes do we need to make? How can we adapt to that? If we are unwilling and unable to adapt, we will not succeed, and we will bear a large part of the fault for our own demise.

I think the last thing students in college should be doing is depending on the advice of their parents about what the career of the future is.
Marty Baron, former editor of the Washington Post

Mark Caro: Over the past several months, AI has become a huge talking point: AI is going to destroy journalism; it’ll take away newspaper writers’ jobs and those in Hollywood. Or AI is going to be a useful tool that’ll help reporters and editors do the stuff they don’t want to do so they can concentrate more on the stuff they do want to do. What is your feeling on AI? Is it going to be helpful, or is it something to be fearful of?

Marty Baron: Like most technology it’ll be both: I think it can be something to be fearful of, but I also think it’s something that can be helpful. I do think that it can help in the writing of stories very quickly and major breaking news events where you can just plug in the basic facts, and then it can construct a story out of that, rather than waiting for you to construct a story out of that. Constructing that, posting it online, the bare-bones material with the basic facts, getting out an alert, optimizing the headline for search (engines), you name it — it can probably do all of that. And it’ll probably be the case that human beings are not going to be doing that kind of work.

On the other hand, it’s not going to supplant investigative reporting, features, analytical pieces or literary pieces. It’s not going to supplant judgment about what we should be pursuing, how we should be playing those stories, what level of emphasis they should have, what should be the follow-up stories. There are a lot of tasks in journalism that generative AI is not going to be able to accomplish.

Mark Caro: Are you concerned that owners, like some of these hedge funds, will look at generative AI and say, “We could have one rewrite person on the staff and maybe someone to write a nice feature story every once in a while, but where we had a dozen people, we can go down to two people?”

Marty Baron: I’m sure if the hedge funds see a way of reducing staff, they’ll do it because that’s been their pattern and practice. So I’m sure that if they can, they will. Whether that’ll be effective for them or not, I don’t know. I would think that there would be competitive nonprofit sites or commercial sites that would arise that could do a better job if they’re smarter about it. And that’s probably going to happen. Look in various places you have seen nonprofits arise. In Baltimore, the Baltimore Banner came into existence (after owner Stewart W. Bainum Jr. was unable to buy the Baltimore Sun from Alden Global Capital)], it’s doing a good job, it’s covering its community. It has a long way to go, but that’s been a reaction to ownership of the Baltimore Sun, and my hope is that the competition between the two, and maybe other news organizations, will lead to a better media environment.

But sure, people are going to take advantage of AI, sometimes for good and sometimes for bad. We have to be concerned about the people who will use it in a bad way, but we should also make sure that we’re not resistant to using new technology in a good way just because sometimes it’s being used in a bad way. I think that we should be willing as a profession to accept it and deploy it in ways that could be really smart for us.

We should make sure that we’re not resistant to using new technology in a good way just because sometimes it’s being used in a bad way.
Marty Baron

Mark Caro: Do you feel like local papers have figured out the whole paywall issue, what works and what doesn’t? Because we’ve had a lot of time to figure it out. The Boston Globe or Detroit News will tweet out an interesting story, and you click and hit the paywall. As someone who works in the field and subscribes to a lot of news publications, I understand the need to collect money, but you can’t subscribe to every out-of-market local paper.

Marty Baron: First, a little perspective, and that is in the old days, when we were all print, which people in our industry seem to romanticize, you couldn’t read that story. You wouldn’t even know it existed, frankly, unless it was covered by the wire services or a network. So now at the very least, you know it exists. The other thing is that it’s up to each individual news organization to decide how much they want to make free, if they want to make anything free. Yes, there are some sites where you can’t get anything. I don’t think that that makes a whole lot of sense, because if you’re just looking for the casual reader, somebody who wants to read one story and is only going to read that story, putting up a paywall is not going to persuade that individual to subscribe. So people need to think about what’s the best model. Maybe you want to make one story a week available or one story a month or whatever it is. Somebody needs to figure that out. Frankly, generative AI can probably be helpful at deciding how do you optimize the financial return, and that’ll help you help you decide what your model should be.

Mark Caro: How are you enjoying reading newspapers while not being at a newspaper?

Marty Baron: I read all online, I don’t take a single thing in print. I read a lot, and I subscribe to a fair amount, but I’m much more selective. Before I felt like I needed to read everything in the Washington Post, and I read our competitors much more thoroughly. Now I’m very discriminating as to how I am going to spend my time, and I’ll start stories and not finish them. I will be much more like an ordinary reader.

I think you do develop a greater appreciation for how ordinary readers read the news. I think something important for all of us in journalism to remember is that the public doesn’t read us the way that we read ourselves. As a species, we are very different. We are news junkies for the most part, and most of the public, they are not news junkies. So I think it’s really important for us to remember that the way we read the news is not the way the vast majority of the public reads the news. And we can preach to them all we want about how they should read the news, and it’s not going to make a damn bit of difference.