Marty Baron is a career journalist and former editor of The Boston Globe and The Washington Post. His newsrooms have garnered 18 Pulitzer Prizes, including the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for The Boston Globe’s coverage of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church — the subject of 2015 Academy Award-winning film “Spotlight.” In March 2023, the Harvard Political Review interviewed Baron about trends in journalism and the future of the field.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Harvard Political Review: As someone who’s been in the field for a long time, how would you broadly evaluate the state of journalism in 2024?
Marty Baron: Well, I think right now we’re in a period of radical reinvention. I think technology is leading us to that, inevitably, because the economic pillars of the business have really collapsed in so many different ways. And there’s so much more competition on the media landscape for people’s attention of all types, including for news. So that represents a radical change from where we were before. When I was growing up in the field, of course, there were only three major networks. There was no national newspaper. There were only some national magazines like Time Magazine and Newsweek, which largely no longer exists. And then, you know, my local paper and that was essentially it.
Now, of course, there’s almost infinite competition for people’s attention. And so many people are getting their information on social media or through other means. And so it’s an incredibly intense, competitive environment. The competition for readers and listeners and viewers is intense, as well as the competition for just advertising dollars is far greater than it ever was before. And so news organizations are having to really rethink how they do their business, how they reach people, how they tell stories, and how they get advertising.
HPR: How can and should the media respond in the circumstance that Donald Trump is elected this November, given his clear opposition to a free press?
MB: Well, first, he would say he’s not opposed to a free press. He just wants a fair press, and fair would mean favorable. I think we should respond by doing our jobs. I’ve always said that. I mean, that’s probably the quote that I’m best known for. A few weeks after Trump took office, he went to the CIA headquarters, and he was standing in front of a memorial to fallen CIA agents. And he said, “I’m in a running war with the media,” seeming to want to enlist intelligence agents in that war with the media. And so a few weeks later, I was asked about that, and I said, “Well, we’re not at war with the administration, we’re at work.” And I still believe that today. I don’t see ourselves being in a war posture. I see ourselves doing our job.
Well, what’s our job? The reason we have a free and independent press in this country is to hold politicians, government officials, and other powerful individuals and institutions to account. James Madison talked about freely examining public characters and measures. The key word there is examining. It’s not tomography. It’s looking at what’s happening behind the curtain. Who did what and why and who influenced them and with what intent and who’s affected and how. Those are the kinds of things that we’re supposed to be looking at. So I think we should just stay at it, regardless of the pressures that are brought against us, and let some really powerful work speak for itself.
HPR: To this point in the election cycle, would you say that Trump has been under less media scrutiny than he was in 2020?
MB: I wouldn’t. I’m not sure why I would come to that conclusion. Certainly, he was under a lot of media scrutiny even in 2016. I mean, we did an entire book about him [at The Washington Post] called “Trump Revealed.” We went and looked at every chapter of his life and career and investigated very thoroughly with dozens of reporters. The New York Times did the same. And in 2020, we were able to judge him based on his own record. So now, you can still judge him on his own record. And then in addition to that, we can judge him based on what he said he intends to do, the kinds of people he’s met with, the statements he’s been making over a period of time. So I wouldn’t say that he’s under less scrutiny now. I think there’s been a fair amount of scrutiny.
Whether that matters to voters or not is another matter. Whether they feel that those are issues that they care about, that’s a different issue. But I think that, for the most part, the press has given the public the information that it needs and deserves to know, which is what I think we ought to be doing. And then the public decides what to do with that information.
HPR: You called the decline of local journalism the biggest crisis currently facing journalism. Could you expand on the importance of local journalism amid the landscape of national media and legacy media?
MB: Well, all you need to do is look at what’s happening. There are a lot of news organizations that have just gone out of business completely, leading to what are called news deserts: places that have no actual news coverage whatsoever. In addition to that, there are a lot of places where you still have a news organization, but the resources that are dedicated to covering those communities are far, far fewer than existed previously. Right now, you have lots of institutions that are going uncovered. City councils, county commissions, courts, and school boards. In many states, even the biggest news organization in the state may only have one person covering the entirety of state government. That’s almost impossible. And in many instances, those news organizations have absolutely nobody in Washington covering their congressional delegation. That’s a sign to politicians and government officials that whatever they do, nobody’s going to notice, and then all sorts of bad things can happen. You don’t even know what they are because nobody’s even bothering to look.
So that is a huge crisis for journalism today. And it is the biggest one. At the national level, The New York Times is succeeding, The Wall Street Journal is succeeding. At The Washington Post, we had six straight years of profitability. And then when you see new news organizations being created, most of them are at the national level. So even in the nonprofit sphere, they are very much at the national level and it’s much more of a challenge to create news organizations at the local level. Small nonprofits are being created. It’s very unclear whether they’ll be able to survive or not. We don’t know yet. I hope they do. But even those small nonprofits are not covering their communities to the same degree that older traditional commercial enterprises did in the past.
HPR: You have said that in spite of negative trends in local journalism, you remain an optimist. What would your message be to those who air on the side of pessimism? And on that note, does your optimism extend to the field of journalism as a whole?
MB: I always try to be an optimist. I think that we can’t afford not to be optimistic, because journalism is too important, and it needs to succeed. And I don’t know how we’re going to succeed if we expect to fail. What makes me optimistic is that I’ve seen a lot of news organizations actually turn around. The New York Times is a classic example of that. Around 2009, people were expecting The New York Times to declare bankruptcy. They had to go to a billionaire in Mexico, Carlos Slim, to borrow a huge amount of money. People said Buzzfeed News, Vice, The Huffington Post were going to take over. Well, The New York Times turned itself around. Same thing with The Washington Post. When I got there, everybody said it was sliding into oblivion. It did not have a model for turning itself around. And with Bezos’ contributions, we were able to turn the place around and have six straight years of profitability. That tells me that it is possible to turn things around.
The other thing is that there have been some news organizations that have come onto the scene that have succeeded. Axios is an example of that at the national level, among many others. And it’s great to see new organizations being created. I’m sure we’ll see others that are trying to rethink how we both report and deliver the news. At the local level, there are nonprofits that are coming into existence. Major foundations, including one where I serve on the board, the Knight Foundation, along with the MacArthur Foundation and others have begun to understand that they need to help foster local news coverage, whether it’s nonprofit or commercial. Ultimately, these smaller nonprofits at the local level will have to find a way to become self-sustaining. They can’t depend forever on foundation support. But they have to find support within their own communities the same way that talk radio does so. But it’s great to see them come into existence. To me, that’s a sign of support.
And then the final thing that I would mention is that there’s a lot of good journalism out there. All you have to do is look at the prizes and at the quality of the work. There’s some really tremendous journalism that’s being created.
