Marty Baron

You are currently browsing articles tagged Marty Baron.

“We Are Not Living In A Traditional Newstelling Time”

December 21, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

ted-thai-new-york-mayor-ed-koch-in-his-office-reading-the-washington-post-during-the-newspaper-strike

The Washington Post, which went from taking the pulse of the world to barely having one of its own, just another newspaper laid low despite its Watergate fame, couldn’t have hoped for a better fate than Jeff Bezos buying the company in 2013 with some of his couch-cushion change. But as WaPo has become something of a digital juggernaut, aggressively publishing 1,200 pieces a day online to gain eyeballs, the question is whether the quantity has been matched by quality. It isn’t quite Buzzfeed with brain-numbing listicles, but some of the content is questionable. There are no easy answers to the thorny new questions, though I certainly enjoy it more post-Bezos.

From Lukas I. Alpert and Jack Marshall at WSJ:

While Mr. Bezos has rarely visited the paper’s offices, he holds a one-hour teleconference with the paper’s top managers once every two weeks. Twice a year, Post executives fly to Seattle for daylong retreats with their boss.

On the calls, Mr. Bezos is given briefings on everything from how the paper is dealing with ad blocking to the status of technology upgrades. He primarily focuses on improvements to the paper’s digital products, particularly its mobile apps, and its distribution strategies and has stayed out of editorial matters, executives said.

“He does not get involved in the journalism except to encourage us to hire the best journalists that we can,” Mr. Ryan said. “He has really focused on the technology and customer side, which has been one of the hallmarks of Amazon. Our engineers have an open line to him and he has made his expertise available to us anytime.”

…
 
Some critics have raised questions about whether the new focus has resulted in an increasing amount of poorer quality content in the drive to attract more readers and whether it will ultimately lead to what the Post will need most to survive: more digital subscribers. The paper’s executives declined to get into specifics about finances or how many digital subscribers they have signed up. The New York Times had 1.04 million digital subscribers at the end of the third quarter, while The Wall Street Journal had 819,000.

Post executives say while they are always looking for the best ways for content to succeed, they insist they are not cheapening their journalism. “The Internet is its own medium but we approach everything as Washington Post stories. They may not always be traditional newspaper stories, but we are not living in a traditional newstelling time,” said editor-in-chief Marty Baron.•

Tags: , , ,

“What Exactly Is Bezos Up To At The Washington Post?”

February 20, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

It’s pretty clear that Jeff Bezos doesn’t have a silver bullet to fire at the vampire world which has feasted on the Washington Post and every other traditional print newspaper, but he has plenty of gold to keep things running and growing until an answer materializes. For that reason, the Post’s chances are much rosier these days, a marked change from the recent period of steep decline. From Isabell Hülsen of Spiegel:

Until a little over a year ago, the Post was a newspaper in a “we’re still here” twilight state. Circulation was declining, as were sales, more than 400 jobs had been cut since 2003 and it was unclear whether the paper stood a chance of surviving. The editorial staff clung to the fact that the Post was still a good newspaper and was still winning Pulitzer prizes — in short, that it was still the Washington Post. But that “we’re still here” attitude was also tinged with an odor of decline.

Since August 2013, a new calendar has begun for the 137-year-old newspaper: B.B. — before Bezos, and A.B. — after Bezos. The Amazon CEO has injected new energy into the editorial staff. Instead of simply bringing in cash to allow the staff to continue the status quo, he plunged the Post into a period of cultural change, determined that the paper would reinvent itself and escape the confines of the printed page.

Bezos wants the paper’s editors and journalists to learn to think big. What does a digital newspaper have to look like in 10 or 20 years to keep millions of readers interested? He has given them time — and a lot of money – to come up with an answer.

Not surprisingly, there is a hint of Amazon in the air at the Post these days. Any experiment that promises to bring in millions of new readers is encouraged and paid for. Bezos reasons that once the Post has penetrated into the lives of millions of Americans, profits will somehow materialize on their own. He applied the same rationale to turn Amazon into the world’s largest Internet retailer, revolutionizing consumption and, with the Kindle, the way we read books.

No Magic Pill To Solve Industry’s Woes

But what exactly is Bezos up to at the Washington Post? Is he trying to turn the old world of newspaper publishers upside-down and provide them with an answer to the question on everyone’s mind: How can journalism survive on the Web? Or is the Post ultimately nothing but an exciting hobby for someone who doesn’t know what to do with all his money?

Bezos’s motives remain a mystery to those at the Post. “But it’s ridiculous to believe that Jeff Bezos came here with a magic pill to solve all the media industry’s problems within a year — that’s a preposterous notion. If he knew already what worked, we would not need any experiments,” says Executive Editor Marty Baron.•

Tags: , ,

“It’s Not Surprising That The Mood At The Paper Is A Mix Of Excitement And Confusion”

July 8, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Come what may, Jeff Bezos’ purchase of the Washington Post can only be viewed as a blessing since the Watergate paper had been increasingly taking on water in these more digital times. At least it has a chance now, a decent one. From Michael Meyer’s new CJR report about the Post during the formative stages of its Amazonian era, as the company ramps up in earnest to dominate the world, or, you know, something:

“Editors and reporters talk about the Post becoming a ‘global’ paper. They say that the Post will create a news ‘bundle’ that will repackage all the elements of the print newspaper in a way that readers will pay for in digital form. Using tablets and other devices, Bezos aims to recreate the intimate, cohesive, and somewhat linear consumption experience of old media in a way that makes sense for digital. The newsroom has also been told that the paper will cultivate an audience of 100 million unique visitors. Or paid digital subscribers. One hundred million something. They say that, unlike traditional newspaper publishers with their notions of tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands, their new owner thinks in terms of hundreds of millions. I asked editor Marty Baron why the 100-million number kept coming up in my conversations. What did it refer to? ‘We don’t have a set goal for a hundred million of anything, okay?’ he told me. ‘We just want to grow, that’s all. There’s a desire to increase our number of unique visitors by a very significant degree.’

Given this rather loose mingling of the rhetorical and the actual, of the far horizon and the near-term, it’s not surprising that the mood at the paper is a mix of excitement and confusion. By the time of [publisher Katharine] Weymouth’s town-hall event in April, the Post had already begun to increase staff after a decade of layoffs and buyouts. The hires, aimed at Weymouth’s newly acquired goal of expanding the national audience, were spread across a mix of aggregation projects, blogs, and digital opinion columns, as well as more traditional reporting roles, though the common theme of all the hires was ‘digital sensibility,’ as Baron likes to say.

One reporter told me of the inevitable confusion among the staff, given Weymouth’s sudden push for a strategy of expansion that is ‘directly contrary’ to the previous one of narrowing the paper’s focus. ‘The pendulum swung all the way over and now it’s swinging all the way back again, without anyone ever saying how that came to be or why we’re doing this other than that we need more traffic,’ he said. ‘Everyone’s thrilled that we’re hiring again, and hiring really good people for the most part. But it’s not clear to the rank and file how this comes together into a vision for what we want to do and what we want to be. That’s been the problem for 15 years.’

An editor added: ‘I think Bezos wants us to be everything for everyone, the same way Amazon is.'”

Tags: , , ,