Where are the Marty Baron-like giants of Canadian journalism?
Jim Sheppard is a former executive editor of globeandmail.com. He also held senior newsroom management positions at washingtonpost.com and ABCNEWS.com
Marty Baron’s resignation as executive editor of The Washington Post is a great loss (at least temporarily) for journalism.
But buried away in the laments about his departure and compliments about his tenure are some critical lessons for major media outlets in Canada – lessons which they are steadfastly refusing to learn and which are slowly killing them.
Baron, 66, led The Post to 10 Pulitzer Prizes. He said in an internal memo Tuesday that he feels "ready to move on," although he said he has no immediate plans for his future. His last day at the paper will be February 28.
In his eight years at the helm, Baron and owner Jeff Bezos transformed the Post from a storied institution (think Woodward, Bernstein and Watergate) — but one with a limited and failing regional market — into an international powerhouse.
How? Going digital was a key factor.
Baron took the helm at a time when many newspapers, including The Post, were in general financial decline.
But instead of presiding over a long, slow decline — as major media owners are deliberately doing in Canada — he oversaw an expansion of the newsroom from 580 journalists then to more than 1,000 this year.
"The newsroom of 2021 will be the biggest in history, an investment that signals overwhelming confidence in our prospects," Baron wrote. "In sum, The Post has come a long way in a short time."
Post CEO Fred Ryan added in a memo Tuesday: “Under Marty’s eight years of newsroom leadership, The Washington Post has experienced a dramatic resurgence and has soared to new journalistic heights.
He said Baron had “significantly expanded our coverage areas, inspired great reporting, managed an awesome digital transformation and grown the number of readers and subscribers to unprecedented levels.”
Key to the Post's expansion was a digital subscription model fueled by scoops and other must-read stories, CNN noted.
Let me repeat that.
Key to the Post's expansion was a digital subscription model fueled by scoops and other must-read stories, CNN noted.
Note also that The New York Times made more money last year – in the middle of a pandemic – from digital rather than print.
Contrast the growth in reporters and the financial success of The Post and The Times in recent years with the long, slow, sad — but planned and avoidable — decline in newsrooms in Canada where media publishers and major broadcasters are afraid to do the one thing that will save them in the end – go digital.
As I’ve argued several times before today, they need to focus on digital users and subscribers because advertising revenue, which had been declining for many years, cratered as a result of COVID and may be the final nail in the coffin of many venerable newspapers.
They also need to follow the example of The Post and The Times by increasing the number of journalists, not slashing them; by focusing on producing more quality journalism, not less; and by being unafraid to go digital – where the users and the dollars are. (I give at least a partial pass to The Toronto Star, which has announced plans to both expand the number of journalists it employs and to focus on digital. Hopefully, they will follow through.)
But the major media owners are too afraid to do that. Instead, they go cap in hand to Ottawa looking for federal government handouts and for a new tax on Facebook and Google to compensate them for the digital giants’ use of their news. The latter is, of course, a great idea but it’s not likely to happen in the near future, nor is it ever going to replace the vast amounts of money they have lost in advertising or the huge cost of their antiquated infrastructures.
They also continue to slash their digital teams and increasingly rely on algorithms, not journalists, to decide what content we see and when and where on their oft-ignored sites.
Instead of being as bold — and successful — in going digital as Baron and The Post did, Canadian media owners are in danger of becoming “dinosaurs on a melting ice cap,” doomed to die, as CBC chief executive Catherine Tait warned recently.
Instead of producing great journalism with an increasing staff, and becoming profitable by making the digital transformation that is so necessary, the media owners are steadily shrinking newsrooms, resulting in reduced journalistic output when Canada needs it most to plan for recovery in a post-COVID world.
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