Former Washington Post executive editor Marty Baron has said the newspaper “over-expanded” amid an advertising collapse and failed to match up to The New York Times on the bundle.
Baron, who led the Post from 2013 until his retirement in 2021, was asked to discuss the state of paywalls during a Q&A session at the WAN-IFRA World News Media Congress in Copenhagen on Tuesday.
The Washington Post does not report its subscriber numbers but is believed to have around 2.5 million, down from a peak of three million at the end of 2020.
Giving his analysis, Baron said: “The situation at the Post is they invested heavily in hiring a lot of staff. They way over-expanded at a time that digital advertising was collapsing. So that was a problem.”
Marty Baron on Washington Post failure to win bundle war
He said that when Jeff Bezos acquired the Post in 2013 he “talked immediately about reconstituting the bundle, like what newspapers used to be as a place where you got information on all sorts of things, things that you could use in your daily life, et cetera, not just news.
“But the reality is The New York Times did a better job of reconstituting the bundle. They did reconstitute the bundle… and we didn’t do it adequately.
“I mean, we soared on the basis of coverage of politics, investigations, a lot of other things that helped drive that coverage. But when Trump left office, there was a collapse in interest in political news, Biden wasn’t nearly as interesting, and people started taking the press for granted again.
“Before, they weren’t taking the press for granted. They felt that there were very few institutions that were going to hold Trump accountable. They didn’t have confidence that Congress would do it. They didn’t have confidence that the courts would do it. And so they were looking at the press and when they looked at the press in the United States, they looked at two institutions, The New York Times and The Washington Post.
“But in terms of subscriptions, yes it’s true that a lot of people have dropped their subscriptions, partially for economic reasons, partially through a lack of interest, partially because for us, for the Post, politics was less interesting.
“I think there are a whole range of issues. There’s always a lot of churn and so you offer people discounts, and then when you want to charge them full price, they drop it. We faced this in the newspaper industry for decades, lots of churn of that sort. So getting past that is, I think, a huge challenge.”
Baron pointed out that news subscriptions are “not that expensive” compared to “what people spend for a bottle of water”.
He cited a conversation with interns when he was still at the Boston Globe, where he was editor between 2001 to 2012, after it launched its paywall in 2011.
They said “we’re college students, we can’t afford a subscription” and he responded: “Is that true?… Well, how much do you spend on beer every week?”
He told them: “You choose to spend your money on something else. What we need to do is we need to persuade people and demonstrate to people, day in and day out and all day long, that we are providing concrete value to their lives, not just in terms of the coverage of news…”
The New York Times has been successful, he said, by insinuating itself into people’s daily routine through the games they play in the mornings through to checking Wirecutter when they need to buy something.
“So they have demonstrated their value and they’re seeing the benefits of that. And what all news organisations need to do, from the biggest to the smallest at the local level, is demonstrate that you’re providing absolutely essential reading, or if you’re a broadcast outlet, same thing, something that people really value.”
Marty Baron: News industry facing ‘radical reinvention’
Baron also commented on the “turmoil” facing news organisations with at least 8,000 journalism jobs cut in the UK and North America in 2023 and 1,700 in 2024 so far and put it down to the fact the industry is being “radically reinvented”.
He also noted the media industry is not the only one making large-scale layoffs, pointing to the tech industry.
“We’re going through a radical reinvention of our business in every way, in terms of our internal processes all the way to how we tell stories,” Baron said.
“The way we tell stories is changing. What you need to do, I mean, it’s not necessarily us [the Post], but others are telling stories on Tiktok in ten seconds and 15 second videos and we may not like that, but the consumer does. And so the question is, how do we change the way that we tell stories?
“I think there’s no question that storytelling will become much more visual, that we will have to incorporate in every story we do whatever tool happens to be the best way to tell the story, whether it’s an interactive graphic or whether it’s a video, or whether it’s audio, or whether it’s actual text, or some combination of that in a story, and then that has to become sort of a routine in our business and that’s very much in mind that people have shorter attention span these days, and how do we adapt to that?”
However Baron noted that there are younger media organisations “that are doing quite well, and we should look at those and try to understand why are they succeeding?”
He cited technology publications The Information, 404 Media and Platformer as well as non-profit outlets Chalkbeat, which covers the education sector, and Spotlight PA, which publishes news and investigations for Pennsylvania.
‘If we act as combatants, we should give up on incurring public’s trust’
On Trump, Baron said the ex-president and his allies want the press to be the opposition and journalists must ensure they don’t fall into that trap or they will lose public trust.
He said: “There’s no question that various governments and politicians and political parties… are at war with us. But I think it’s very important that we not see ourselves as combatants – that we see ourselves as professionals, and that we behave like professionals. The minute that we start acting like combatants, we should just give up on incurring the public’s trust.
“At the beginning of the Trump administration, Steve Bannon, who was then the aide of his who’s now back in the campaign, said that the press is the opposition party, he wants the press to act like the opposition party. And if the press does behave like the opposition parties, then it just falls into the trap that they are setting for us and it gives them an opportunity, it gives them ammunition, to say they’re just the Democratic Party, there’s no difference between the press and the Democratic Party. So it’s important that we maintain our standards, that we behave appropriately, we behave as professionals and that we maintain our institution.
“The institution of the press is fundamental to a democracy. We will actually help end up eroding and destroying the institution of the press if we don’t have institutional standards, if we don’t have standards of behaviour for ourselves, then what makes us different from anybody else? What makes us different from an activist? What makes us different from an advocate? They’re all respectable roles in society… But you’re journalists.
“Now, we’re not stenographers, okay, we’re not stenographers. That’s a different thing. We’re journalists. So that means that we need to look behind the curtain and we need to look beneath the surface with the goal of getting at the truth and giving that to the public in a fearless and direct and straightforward way. Not false equivalence, not false balance, none of that. It’s an open mind. Go find the truth, look at the evidence as it is, and then evaluate honestly and honourably and all that, and then tell people what you’ve actually found.”
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