MEDIA: Post editor sees exciting, anxious time for journalism

By Mark Muckenfuss
Press-Enterprise
April 07, 2015

http://www.pe.com/articles/baron-764175-hays-post.html

The Washington Post Executive Editor Martin Baron delivers the 47th Annual Hays Press-Enterprise Lecture at UC Riverside on Tuesday April 7, 2015.

For Washington Post Executive Editor Martin Baron, society isn’t transitioning into the digital realm, it’s already there. It’s now up to newspapers like the Post and other media outlets to catch up.

Baron addressed a crowd of about 250 people Tuesday night as this year’s speaker for the 47th annual Hays Press-Enterprise Lecture. He spoke about the state of journalism and his vision for what needs to be done in adapting a 20th century model for news gathering and dissemination into the 21st century.

“Never have I seen a moment of so much excitement and so much anxiety,” he told the crowd. “Journalism is being thoroughly re-imagined.”

The retooling of the trade, he said, has brought new opportunities. As the editor of the Boston Globe, Baron oversaw the investigation of sexual abuse in the city’s Catholic Diocese. It was a story that pointed out the power of the Internet. In the past, such a story might not have seen much attention beyond New England.

Instead, he said, “the investigation of the church had the largest reach of anything that had ever come out in the Globe. The audience was worldwide.”

Social platforms allowed those concerned about the issue to more easily organize themselves and do additional investigation on their own.

“If you think all that is great,” he said, “it comes with an ironic twist. The very medium that enables this distribution is destroying the economic model that allowed the work to be done in the first place.”

With advertisers turning more and more to the Internet, newspapers have been unable to sustain the business model of the past. Newsroom staffs today are about one-third of what they were 15 years ago.

Baron’s message to other papers was to forget about the old models.

“We just have to get over it,” he said. “We are a digital society. We are a mobile society.”

Change is reality, he said.

“What will happen to media is what happens to any organism in an unfamiliar environment,” he said. “It mutates. It adapts.”

Some of those adaptations will come with discomfort, he said. First among those will be the disappearance of newsprint in the coming years.

Baron said the traditional wall that existed between the business operations of a media company and its newsroom will need to come down, but “without abandoning our principles of independence.”

New applications, he said, will require advertising to be more effectively linked with how stories are presented. The Post, he said, currently has 47 engineers working in its newsroom to create new programs and applications. The company plans to launch an app for the Kindle Fire in coming weeks, he said.