In deze aflevering
Voor de allereerste aflevering schoof meteen een levende legende aan: Martin Baron, oud-hoofdredacteur van The Boston Globe en The Washington Post. Als hoofdredacteur van de Globe stond hij aan de basis van het misbruikonderzoek naar de katholieke kerk dat verfilmd werd als het Oscarwinnende Spotlight. Bij de Post maakte hij de digitale ommezwaai onder eigenaar Jeff Bezos en groeide de krant naar drie miljoen digitale abonnees.
Baron vertelt openhartig over zijn omgang met Donald Trump: het diner in het Witte Huis waar de president hem bij elke sneer een elleboogstoot gaf, en de telefoontjes waarin Trump klaagde dat de krant hem als “een klein jongetje” neerzette. Hij legt uit hoe Trump druk zet op vrije media, niet zozeer via de redactie, maar via de zakelijke belangen van de eigenaar. Precies daarom is hij zo kritisch op Bezos’ besluit om elf dagen voor de verkiezingen het endorsement van Kamala Harris in te trekken.
Voor mediamakers zit er veel vakmanschap in de tweede helft: hoe Baron een printredactie digitaal kreeg (inclusief de gevreesde “Marty bot” die reporters aan hun deadline herinnerde), waarom de Post naliet wat The New York Times wél deed (de bundel heruitvinden met koken, puzzels en Wirecutter) en zijn recept voor authentieke journalistiek in het influencer-tijdperk. Zijn motto tegenover een vijandige president blijft het beluisteren waard: we zijn niet in oorlog, we zijn aan het werk.
Het gesprek is Engelstalig; de Nederlandse intro en afsluiting zijn in het transcript weggelaten.
Deze aflevering is Engelstalig.
“We're not at war with the administration. We're at work.”
Martin Baron · 30:28
Hoofdstukken
- 4:09 Welkom, Marty Baron
- 4:25 Spotlight: gespeeld worden door Liev Schreiber
- 6:20 De eerste redactievergadering bij The Boston Globe
- 9:43 Aan tafel bij Trump in het Witte Huis
- 13:39 "I am not a little boy": telefoontjes van de president
- 17:00 Hoe Trump druk zet op vrije media
- 19:30 De tweede termijn: drie zorgen
- 21:43 Waarom Bezos het Harris-endorsement introk
- 30:05 "We're not at war, we're at work"
- 44:33 Zijn grote nieuwsorganisaties obsoleet?
- 52:51 De digitale ommezwaai van de Post
- 1:01:00 De gemiste kans: het bundel-moment
Transcript Lees het volledige transcript
Dit transcript is automatisch gegenereerd en licht geredigeerd; er kunnen onnauwkeurigheden in staan. Tijdstempels linken naar het fragment op Spotify.
Okay. So, Marty, I can call you Marty, right?
You can.
Thank you so much. Welcome in the show. And glad to have you here. We have a lot to discuss, and I'm going to go to my colleague, Felipe, for the first question.
Yeah. First of all, Marty, you are one of the very few editors in chief who is portrayed in a Hollywood movie. The Oscar winning movie spotlight about the uncovering of child abuse in the Catholic Church by your newspaper, The Boston Globe. You then editor of, So I think only Ben Bradlee of the Washington Post has played such a role or an actor and your actor portraying you was Liev Schreiber. And, did he portray you well?
Well, I'm certainly not disappointed. I'm delighted with his performance. First of all, he's taller than I am. He's a better looking than I am, and he's more fit than I am. So when people hear his name, when they hear my name, they'll think of him. And that's okay with me.
Yeah. The Hollywood version of, Yeah, exactly.
So it's much better than the original. So yeah, I'm happy with that and I'm happy with the role. I mean, it was a time in my life that was quite different. Some of my friends said that he didn't portray my sense of humor. I'm glad that they think that I have a sense of humor, but I think at that point in my career and my life, I wasn't demonstrating much of a sense of humor because I was an outsider in the city of Boston and at the Boston Globe, and we were taking on a very important subject. And then, of course, six weeks after I arrived in Boston, we had the attacks of 9/11. And those two of the planes, the planes that hit the World Trade Center towers came out of Boston. So it was a very serious time. And I was an outsider in that newsroom and in the city. And so I don't think I demonstrated a great sense of humor at the time.
No. But you demonstrated something else in the film. You really have a hero's role saying on your first day, like, I read this in the column, and shouldn't we investigate a little bit more into this? Is this how it really happened?
Yeah, it is how it happened. So I had about three weeks between jobs when I was I was working in Miami when I was offered the job as the editor of the Boston Globe. I had been editor of the Miami Herald, and I was very interested in what was happening in Boston. I didn't know anything about Boston. I had hardly spent any time in Boston, so I was reading everything I possibly could. I read about six books, and I was reading the Boston Globe from the beginning to the end to look for stories. The Sunday I was supposed to start on a Monday and the Sunday before I was supposed to start. There was a column written by a Pulitzer Prize winning columnist by the name of Eileen McNamara, and she wrote about the case of a priest who was accused of abusing as many as 80 kids. And the at the end of the column. Well, she noted that the lawyer for the victims of this priest had said that the Cardinal was aware of this abuse, this repeated abuse, and yet continually reassigned this priest from parish to parish without notifying anybody, without notifying the parish priest, without notifying the parishioners, and without notifying the public, thus enabling this priest to continually abuse children. And the archdiocese flatly denied that. They said the cardinal was not aware of this. And she said at the end of the column that the truth may never be known because the internal church documents that might reveal the truth were under a court seal, a seal of confidentiality. And, and so I was very interested in this case because I had not heard of it. And I thought that a case that, where potentially more than 80 children were abused by a single priest was interesting in and of itself.
But it was particularly interesting because of the possibility that the cardinal in the Boston Archdiocese was aware of this abuse and allowed it to continue, thus enabling further abuse. And so I went into my first meeting on my first day at the Boston Globe. It was 10:00 in the morning. As was customary. We went around the room. All the department heads or their deputies spoke about what they were working on for the day, and nobody mentioned this case. So I asked about it. I said it was quite a case. And, is there any possibility we can get beyond one side saying one thing and the other side saying something else. Was there a possibility that we could get at the truth of the matter? Because if in fact the cardinal was aware of this priests serial abuse, then that was really extraordinary. And somebody pointed out, well, the documents are under seal. And I said, I knew that I had read it, that was in the column. But had we thought about the possibility of going to court to get those documents disclosed? And there was just silence in the newsroom at that point, I don't think that anybody expected that their new editor, on his first day at his first meeting, would be talking about bringing legal action against the Catholic Church, which was then the most powerful institution in all of New England. And so I said, well, why don't we discuss this after the meeting? And so we did. And then we spoke to our attorney, and he promised to investigate the facts and get back to us in a couple of weeks. And then,
And then the rest is history.
The rest is history.
Yeah.
Very good.
So let's go to Donald Trump. He's in the new president, of the of the United States. So, I'm fascinated by this story. So when he was, in office for a couple of months, he invited you as the editor in chief of the Washington Post and, the owner, Jeff Bezos, and I think your publisher as well to the white House. You shook his hand. You had dinner with him. Describe the scene for us.
Well, mostly, we asked to be invited. Our my publisher asked that we be invited. He said that I would be there, that the editor of the editorial page, which was operated separately, would be there, and that Jeff Bezos would be there.
Why did the publisher ask the white House to be invited?
I think he felt that, the primary newspaper in the nation's capital should be familiar with the president of the United States and that he should be familiar with us. And, and that it would be a good idea for, for us to meet. But I was very nervous about the meeting and very uncomfortable with it for several reasons. One was that Trump is a very transactional person. If he does you some favor in this case, having dinner with you, he would expect something in return because that's his way. And also that Bezos would be there. And we had been telling the public correctly, as a matter of fact, that he was not involved in our news coverage. But Trump would interpret this as his being involved in our news coverage. And if word got out about the meeting to the general public, they would the public would interpret this, and the press generally would interpret this as Trump being involved in our news coverage.
Yeah, but why didn't you address this immediately to the publisher when he asked you or did you?
I did.
But he wouldn't listen.
Well, he listened, but he didn't agree. So you get used to that sometimes as editor. He felt it would be a good idea, and I. So I went along. I mean, it was fine, but I was very uncomfortable with the meeting, and particularly with the idea that Bezos would be present. So we had the meeting. He was superficially Trump was superficially charming. He showed us around a little bit.
And where did you have the meeting and what?
We had the white House in the Blue Room. And so, there was a dinner. Jared Kushner was there. Melania was there and Ivanka was supposed to be there, but she wasn't there because a Trump ally in Congress had just been shot, by somebody who hated Trump at a practice game for the congressional baseball game. And she attended the she attended the game. There were questions as to why Trump didn't attend the game. And the white House said it was for security reasons. But the reality is he was just having dinner with us. So that was the reason he wasn't at the game. And so, you know, he boasted of all a lot of accomplishments, many of them imaginary, that hadn't actually been accomplished. He did almost all of the talking. He spoke mostly directly to, to Jeff Bezos, who was sitting across the table from him. And the rest of us kept pretty silent. I certainly kept silent. But he would criticize the post regularly. He called us the worst of all media outlets. And, and so, and every time he criticized the post, he would poke me with his elbow. I was sitting to his left and he would poke me with his elbow. And it was very annoying. With anybody else, I would have poked them right back. But of course, you don't do that with the president of the United States.
How many times did he do that? In.
Several. Several times at least. Yeah. So, it was very annoying, but, you know, the meeting ended in a cordial way. And, but he then afterwards, he called Bezos at 8:00 in the morning to make a request.
Okay. And what was the request?
He asked Bezos. He said that I don't know if you get involved in news coverage or not, but I'm sure you do to some extent. And said, can't you do something to make the post more fair to me? And Bezos said to him that he did not get involved in the news coverage of the Washington Post, and that if he did, he would regret it for the rest of his life. And, and ultimately that conversation ended. And then subsequent to that, Trump called me to complain about, a couple of stories.
And he expected you to do something about it.
Well, I don't know what his expectations were, but I know that he called me after he had a state dinner with Narendra Modi, the leader of India. And apparently what he was thinking about during that dinner was his coverage in the Washington Post, because he called me immediately afterwards and to complain about how he was portrayed. And he said that the it was a meeting. It was a story about a meeting involving health care. And he said that the story portrayed him as being a little boy. And then he said these words that I never expected to hear from a president of the United States. And they were. I am not a little boy.
That's something different. Like, I'm not a crook.
Well, it sounded like it actually sounded like a little boy to me, because only little boys say I'm not a little boy, which is what they would say to their parents if they felt they were being treated like one. So.
So this phone call that he, that he made, it was, it was a brief phone call, I assume.
Well, that one was about, there was a subsequent phone call that was longer. That one was maybe 15, 20 minutes.
Okay. But he called you. He called you multiple times.
He called me a second time about a week later, I think it was. And to complain again about a story written by many of the same reporters. And, he said that, the post was nothing but a hate machine. We were a big fat lie. He blamed Amazon for this coverage. He blamed Jeff Bezos for the coverage. And I was at that point, I was so exasperated with that accusation, which was completely untrue because Bezos wasn't involved in the coverage and Amazon wasn't involved in the coverage, neither in any way conceivable anyway, at all. And so I responded. I said, well, that's not true. And, you know, it's not true. And I don't think he was accustomed to hearing that kind of response to him. And he broke out in a bunch of profanities. And, and then he continued to blame Amazon and said we were a big lie. Big fat lie and blamed me. And, the conversation went on for almost a half an hour and I was thinking to myself, well, I'm busy. I've got other things to do. I don't know about the president of the United States, but he just doesn't seem to get off the telephone. You would think the president would be busy.
But how do you address him? Do you call him Mr. Trump? Do you call him Mr. President?
Mr. President, he was president.
And.
The appropriate way.
And how do you finish? How did you finish this, this phone call, this particular phone call?
The way I usually finish phone calls when I just want to get somebody off the phone. And that is, Well, Mr. President, I appreciate your calling and sharing me, sharing your perspective with me. It was good to hear from you on this. And we'll keep what you have to say in mind.
So this, this is unprecedented pressure on, on a free newsroom, in a way, by a president. But there were lots of more ways in which the president and his allies in political allies could, bring pressure to bear on, on you and other newsrooms and free journalism during his first term. Could you share some of that with us?
Sure. I mean, I don't know how did they do it?
I don't know that those calls were unprecedented because I think previous presidents have called editors in the past. So I wouldn't call it unprecedented. But certainly the level of pressure that Trump brought was unprecedented over time. I think his main way of applying pressure was to try to pressure the owner. He felt that if he could put pressure on Jeff Bezos commercial interests, his other commercial interests, of course, Amazon, the company he founded, and then, of course, Blue Origin, his space company that, that he could, that he could put pressure on us, that any businessman would yield to that pressure and then put pressure on us to change our coverage. He really interfered with Amazon. He, he talked to the postal commissioner about trying to raise the rates for delivering Amazon packages. First he talked about doubling them, then tripling them, quadrupling them. He didn't seem to understand that there's a process for doing that. You have to go through hearings. There's a commission, etc. He just wanted to order the postal commissioner to do it and have it done. Secondly, he interfered in a $10 billion cloud computing contract. Amazon is very big in cloud computing. It's a big area of growth. And he tried to do that in order to make sure that the contract did not was not awarded to Amazon. And in fact, it was not awarded to Amazon. So those were the two primary ways that he tried to put pressure. And he tried to put pressure on our staff, primarily by condemning us over and over and over. And worst of all, condemning by name individual reporters on social media, on Twitter, with the clear purpose of subjecting them to harassment, intimidation, threats, actual physical threats. He clearly he knew, certainly had to know that by identifying them by name, that they would be subjected to all sorts of hate and harassment and actual physical threats. And sure enough, they did receive that. So that was his. That was his method.
So now Trump is going to be president for the second time. He has much more power because he controls Congress. He controls the house. So, I mean, I heard you have a long list of options that Trump has to actively sabotage journalism, but could you give us the, the three options that he has that are most worrying for you?
Sure. Only three. Sure. Do three. That's fine. So, I think he's looking for an opportunity to, to prosecute journalists, particularly for leaks. Leaks involving what he would call national security matters and, to try to prosecute them under some laws that go back to the early 1900s. And, and he would like to see some journalists put in jail. He has said that quite directly at his rallies, and he says that when there he has said that when they're in prison, they will meet their bride, meaning that they would be raped. That's what he has said. And he said that to cheers and applause. Secondly, he's already talked. He's already threatened to withdraw the licences for some broadcast, stations, stations that are affiliated with the major networks, where he's very unhappy with the kind of coverage that he has received. And, and so I think he, he's talked about potentially having their licences withdrawn, which would destroy them as, as businesses, because their business depends entirely on those licences. That's another thing that he has done. And then finally, I think that he will enlist his allies to file regular lawsuits for libel and slander against news organizations there by costing them enormous amount of money to defend themselves and running the risk, of course, of very large libel settlements, but primarily for the purpose of harassing them. He has many allies who are very, very wealthy and who can actually underwrite those lawsuits on behalf of other people and who, who I think can and will.
Jeff Bezos has been a good owner of The Washington Post, as you described in your book, and also his reaction to the first pressure the president put on him. And he didn't succumb. And but this time around, he pulled back an endorsement by the editorial board of the Washington Post of Kamala Harris just 11 days before the election. You have been one of his loudest critics on the theme. Why did Bezos do this?
Well, I can't get into his head, and he hasn't called me to share his thinking. But and his he's tried to explain himself with a piece that he wrote for the Washington Post, and a note to readers claiming that this was a return to the original spirit of independence at The Washington Post, which declares itself to be an independent newspaper, and that by writing an endorsement for president, that's a violation of the spirit of independence, and that it was needed in order to begin the process of restoring trust in the press and in The Washington Post. I think there were other reasons, and I think there's a reason, strong reason to believe there were other reasons. The primary reason was that he was beginning to succumb to pressure from Donald Trump. Keep in mind that Donald Trump has campaigned on the idea of seeking vengeance against his perceived political enemies. Jeff Bezos has always been perceived to be a political enemy by Donald Trump for one reason and one reason only, and that is because he owns The Washington Post and because of its coverage. And so, and, you know, the fact is, is these, these, these presidential endorsements have been published for 50 years since 1976. And they began to be published at the time of Watergate, right after Richard Nixon. And that was clearly the motive for beginning to publish presidential endorsements, is that you had a president in Richard Nixon who had abused his power and who had weaponized the U.S. Government against his political enemies, which is exactly what Trump has done and promises to do, even to a greater degree in a in a new term. And so, so that was the reason. And to do this, only 11 days before the election, when it appeared that Donald Trump might well win that election, suggested that there were it was concerned about the kind of pressure that Donald Trump would bring on Amazon and on Blue Origin, both of which have substantial contracts and hope for more from the US government.
So then all of a sudden, in these circumstances, it's not so good to have a billionaire owner with a lot of vested business interests that can be hit by Trump, then it's better to be The New York Times and just be the property of one family that has only the New York Times company.
Well, you know, you are you can't change the fact of what you are. And it was I think his ownership has been good for the post for a long period of time. He did, to his credit, and with my enormous gratitude, stand up for our independence for a long period of time, under enormous pressure from Donald Trump. There's no perfect form of ownership. Unfortunately, every form of ownership is a problem, can be a problem. When we were publicly traded companies, the concern then was that, the managers of the company were oriented towards short term profits and boosting the price of the stock and, and the, the amount of dividends, then you have private equity funds and hedge funds which have treated newspapers like, like, annuities, just trying to extract as much cash from them. You have these individual owners who are very wealthy and they many of them, well, all of them have other commercial interests which can, can affect their thinking about, about coverage. And then you begin to see in the United States the emergence of more of a nonprofit sector of journalism. But even those, you know, when you're looking for people to donate, you would like to have some major donors. Those are rich people who have their own interests, or they are foundations that have their own causes they wish to pursue and to wish to advance. And so there is no perfect form of ownership. And, but yeah, we, you do see, I think some reasons why people would have concern about wealthy individuals owning news organizations. But the question is, what's, the great alternative?
Can I ask you another question, Philippe, about the endorsements? Because I was just wondering, what is your view on the endorsements right now in 2024? I mean, I can imagine the case, what was the case in 1976? But right now the field has changed, hasn't it?
Well, first of all, the conditions that existed in 1976 certainly exist today. You have a president who has promised to weaponize the American government against his perceived political enemies. You have a president, you have an incoming president who has a history of abusing his power and promises to do more. I'm not saying that I care whether the post endorses for president or not. I don't care, because certainly the public can make up their own mind about who they prefer to have for president.
Yeah, but that's what I'm talking about because of the polarization in society and, and the trust that people might have in a, in an institution as, as the Washington Post.
Well, I don't I don't there's no actual evidence that an editorial endorsement for president, published once every four years, is a significant factor in the public's view of media. There are many other factors. So starting with the idea that we have tremendous fragmentation in media today, which has been brought about because of the internet, and people can go to any site on the internet and find affirmation of their pre-existing worldview, and they can find affirmation of any conspiracy theory that they might have as well. And so, and then you have increased polarization, not because of the press, but the press feels that polarization. And, and so that has a big impact on trust in news organizations. And that is not, I would say, substantially addressed by not running a presidential endorsement once every four years. And if this had been a decision that Jeff Bezos had made three years ago, two years ago or a year ago, maybe even six months ago, I would have no problem with it. That's a reasonable decision. There are any number of news organizations that don't run endorsements. And certainly you don't typically in Europe. I don't believe the newspapers do that. Although many newspapers and media in Europe have clear ideological alliances with particular parties, which is not the case in the United States. So, you know, we have various differences. But look, if Jeff Bezos had done this earlier, I wouldn't have a problem. And by the way, I would I wouldn't have what would convince me that this had something to do with reestablishing trust in the press, as if there had been a trust initiative at the post where they looked at all the complexities involved in trust, where there was an effort to address, all of the factors and to implement new policies and approaches to coverage that could help address concerns about, about bias and what have you in the press.
But there is no such initiative. And the paper continued to make endorsements. By the way, it continued to endorse in the Maryland, the state of Maryland to continue to endorse in the Senate race in Virginia. It continued to endorse in a very high profile race for the House of Representatives. He continued to run editorials on various subjects, including highly charged political subjects. There's only one thing that it did to address the issue of trust, supposedly, and that is not to run a presidential endorsement and to announce that decision 11 days before the election. Where are the other where are the other efforts to address trust? I don't see any. And so it suggests that there were other reasons, reasons other than the ones stated for not running a presidential endorsement. And we have, you know, this expression in the United States of don't poke the bear, don't needlessly antagonize someone if you don't have to. They didn't have to run a. They didn't have to run an editorial. So I think Bezos decided, why should we do that if we don't have to. All it will do is antagonize him.
So interesting. Marty. And what is, in your eyes, the best answer for an independent newsroom in such circumstances? When the president declares you the enemy of the people and is attacking you in various ways, your famous line is we're not at war, we're at work. It was put up on the wall of The Washington Post after you left as editor in chief. Is that still valid?
I think it is valid. I mean, that line came about because, on Trump's first full day as president, the day after he was inaugurated, he went to the CIA to meet with them. He had a difficult relationship with the CIA. He had he blamed them for the Russia the investigation into Russia's interference in the election. And standing in front of a memorial to CIA agents who had died in the service of their country. What did he choose to talk about? Well, his favorite subject, which was the media. And he said, as many of you know, I have a running war with the media. And his intention appeared to be to try to enlist intelligence agents in his war with the media, because he is their boss, he was their boss and will be again. And so I was asked a couple of weeks after that what my reaction was, and I said, we're not at war with the administration. We're at work. And, and we have our job to do. The reason that we have an independent press in the United States is, in fact, to hold power to account, to, to report on what's happening in our government and what's happening in society overall. And there's no one more powerful in the world than the president of the United States. I can't think of anybody. And we would be abdicating our responsibilities if we did not report on what the president of the United States was actually doing, who he was meeting with, who he's being influenced by, what kind of impact his policies would have. And so that's our job. That's why that's why the founders of, of, of the United States, included freedom of the press in the First Amendment of the Constitution.
Yeah. I also interpreted this sentence, we are not at war. We're at work as a call not to become the anti-Trump opposition newspaper because you just want to do the reporting and not, have yourself seduced to, to also run a war against him because that's, that's obviously what he wants.
Right? Well, yes, that's true. And keep in mind that at the beginning of the Trump administration, his close aide at the time, Steve Bannon, said that the, the, the media is the opposition party. And they would like nothing better than to have us behave like the opposition party, because if we behave like the opposition party, they can discredit everything we do, even perhaps more successfully than they're able to do today, because they argue that we are the opposition party and we're behaving like the opposition party. So I think it's important that we not behave like the opposition party, that we maintain our independence from all political parties, that we hold everybody accountable and that we do our. That we not behave like combatants, but that we behave like professionals and fulfil the responsibilities of our job, which is to report on, in this case, the president of the United States, the most powerful person in the world.
And what's your view on Wokeism and Activistic journalism in this instance?
Well, I don't tend to use the word wokeism and woke and all of that because it's not so well received and all of that. Look, I mean, I think that, what my concern has always been about expressions of opinion and reactions on social media, that I think that is our, there's so much that's happening there that I think is inappropriate. It's impulsive, it's snarky. It's, it's sarcastic. There's bad humor. Really bad humor. It's, rush, rush to judgment, all of that. A lot of passing along of not of information. Supposed information that's not actually verified and is often wrong. And I think that is very unhelpful to us. I know where it comes from. It comes from, concern about what Trump represents, that it represents an assault on the norms of a democracy and assault on free expression and the free press. A person who, who celebrates his own abuse of power. And, and so all of that is, is I understand where it comes from, but I think it, it undermines our mission. It undermines public confidence in us. I think we, if people want to be an activist. They certainly have a right to be an activist, but they can't be a journalist for a mainstream traditional news organization at the same time. I think activists play an incredibly important role in democracy. We need them. But if you want to become one, go somewhere else.
In your book, you, you write that the media probably played a role in the loss of Hillary Clinton for her run for president in 2016 against Trump. You wrote that the media were too focused on Clinton. On topics that were, in hindsight, not that important, such as the emails she sent from her personal account. What is your take on the media in this election and what role have they played and should they have done anything different?
Well, first of all, I would say, that I think the media was not primarily responsible for the loss of Hillary Clinton in 2016. I think she was primarily responsible for the loss. I don't think she was an excellent candidate. And certainly, and I would also point the finger at James Comey, who was then the director of the FBI, because he announced just in the final days of the campaign that he was essentially reopening an investigation of the emails. At just at that point, Trump's poll ratings were collapsing and they were collapsing because the Washington Post published the so-called Access Hollywood tapes, where he boasted about how he groped women and how they would let you do it when you're famous like him. And immediately after we published that, that, that tape, his poll ratings started to collapse. And if the election had been held, then I think he would have lost. But then James Comey came out and announced that he was, reopening that investigation. You know, how did the press perform now? I think the press performed pretty well. I mean, it has critics on both the right and the left. The left feels that the press hasn't been hard enough on Trump. And the and the right feels that it's been it's been unfair to Trump. And is clueless about America. And but I think pretty much all voters, they know who Trump is. They know what he stands for. They know what his personality is. They know what his you know, what his good characteristics are and what is bad characteristics are. And many people voted for him, even though they think he's a liar, which he lies all the time. Because they think they know he's undisciplined.
So why.
Did they vote for.
Him?
They voted for him because I think primarily people voted for him. Well, there are a number of reasons different people vote for different reasons. But I think what pushed him over the top was that people were concerned about their own personal economic circumstances. They were concerned that they were paying higher prices for pretty much everything, substantially higher prices than they did at the end of the of the Trump term, prices for groceries, prices for gas, price for the price for homes to buy a home to, to get a mortgage. All of that was substantially higher. And it made it more difficult for them to make ends meet, for their for their families and, and all that. They were also deeply concerned about the levels of illegal immigration into the country and the southern border, which was, there were waves, huge waves of immigration in the first three years of the Biden administration. And you have to fault the Biden administration for not having done enough to control immigration in those early years. It's doing it now. But if it's doing it now, of course, they could have done it earlier. So, and then I think there's a lot of concern about how much money has been spent in Ukraine. They also blame Biden for the war in the Middle East for various reasons. And, they sort of accept Trump's line that these wars wouldn't have happened if it if he had been president. And then there are moral issues, you know, that people are he received enormous support from evangelical, evangelical Christians who see him as someone who will restore Christianity and its what they deem to be its proper role in US society. So there are a whole range of reasons, but I think the economy, clearly the economy and immigration were the dominant reasons.
Yes. And a lot of analysts after the election stated that the news fluencies with their social media videos and podcasts, were more powerful even than the traditional media this time around. Do you agree with that analysis and is that good or bad for democracy?
Well, I don't know if we can say they were more powerful. They certainly were a powerful factor. And they competed for influence with the general public, no question about it. Particularly the most prominent among them, like Joe Rogan, who appeals to a right, a young male right wing audience. And so, and I do think they had, they had an impact. Look, I mean, I believe in freedom of expression. So that doesn't mean just freedom of expression for the traditional press and the institutional press. That means for everybody. So I don't have an objection to, you know, people having podcasts or people who have podcasts having influence or if they're they exercise their expression on TikTok or wherever, wherever it might be. My concern is, are they telling the truth? Is it fact based? Are they being fair? Who's behind them? Who's financing them? How do they expect to benefit from this? You know, there's very little disclosure about where their money is coming from. There's very little disclosure in many instances about who they who they actually are, even their identity on certain websites and things like that. And, and they certainly don't operate according to any code of ethics. They're certainly critical of the ethics of the traditional press, but we actually have a code of ethics that we're, we're expected to abide by. They have no code of ethics and they don't abide, they don't abide by any particular code of ethics. So, so that's what I, the problem I have, I don't have any problem with them expressing themselves, which is guaranteed under the First Amendment of the Constitution in the same way that it guarantees freedom of the press. I have a problem with whether they are disseminating facts or whether they're disseminating lies and wild conspiracy theories.
The Washington Post went from 800,000 to approximately 3 million subscribers during the first Trump presidency. The newsroom grew to over, 1000. And now, as you, as you said, almost more than 1100 journalists, in your book, you call Trump the best salesman for the Washington Post in history. Under Biden, you lost half of your public. Are you expecting a Trump bump now?
Well, I wasn't there under Biden except for one month. So you said you. But I wasn't there. So you're talking about the post. Yeah. I expect some, some Trump bump, but not much of a Trump bump. I mean, first of all, the post has to recover from, the losses that it suffered because it didn't run, didn't publish a presidential endorsement. It lost 10% of its subscribers within a week. And that's a big loss with 250,000 250,000 subscribers that we know of. So it has to recover those. So any bump will be recovering some of the losses that it's already suffered. Secondly, I think there are a lot of people who are simply they don't even want to listen to the news anymore. There's a lot of news avoidance. They don't want to hear Trump's voice. They don't want to read about Trump. Obviously, these are people who are on the left and or lean left or many moderates as well, and they're just exhausted by it all and frustrated and they feel for their own personal mental health that they just need to read the news or listen to the news a lot less. So there are a lot of, like CNN is suffering in terms of its ratings. Msnbc is suffering in terms of its ratings.
Do you experience the same news avoidance feelings, as, as the ones that you just mentioned? Because if I, if I go back to 2016, I completely went into the rabbit hole of following Trump, following everything that happened. And this, this time around, I'm like, oh no, not again. That rabbit hole. I'm just gonna follow it a bit more distance and just, just on a need to know basis.
Right. Well, first of all, thank you for all that traffic you gave us. During my tenure as editor of the Washington Post. I very much appreciated. Sorry it's taken so long to express my gratitude. But, Yeah, I have the same reaction where, I read less about it than I did before. Certainly I'm not. I'm not. When I was the editor of the post. Of course, I was obligated to read everything, and I did as much as I could. And now I'm much more selective. And what I read. So, you know, that's probably how most readers are reacting. I think right after the election, I was not reading much at all that much at all. But right now I'm reading, I would say a relatively normal amount, but, but yeah, there is some level of news avoidance, as well, because I already know who Trump is. I know what he, he's incredibly open about who he is, you know, and there's nothing real secret there. And so I know what he's going to do and, and I'll wait and wait and watch and see what the impact is. And so I feel like, there's less for me to learn than I did the first time around.
Marty.
One of the founders of Substack, Hamish McKenzie, recently wrote that news organizations like The Washington Post. Now we're talking about the figures are obsolete. A paper company in the age of touchscreen, he said their cost structure, with thousands editorial and sales staff, is too large for the new media age. He writes apart from The New York Times, a soul winner takes all survivor. The future of journalism lies in smaller scale outlets without a legacy baggage. Expert newsletters or new initiatives like the Free Press, Punchbowl News Dispatch are the future of journalism and not the old fashioned big institutions who can't survive economically. Is he right?
Do you know how many times I've heard that the news media is obsolete over the last 30 years? I've heard it over and over and over again. And, and it's interesting that people who say that we're obsolete and irrelevant. They keep talking about us. I don't know why. And that's probably it's because we're not obsolete and we're not irrelevant. All the politicians who say we're irrelevant. For some reason, they obsess about us. So why are they obsessing if we're so irrelevant? I would suggest that it's because we're not. You know, it's only natural for the head of Substack to be saying that the future lies with what I'm doing as opposed to with what you're doing. And, you know, I remember when people said the future of, media in the United States was going to be Huffington Post and BuzzFeed news. Well, BuzzFeed news no longer exists. And Huffington Post is a shadow of its former self. And people said the New York Times was going to go bankrupt in about 2009. It was having severe financial difficulties at the time, as you may recall. It had to get a big loan, $250 million from a Mexican billionaire, Carlos Slim. And, and the New York Times turned itself around and became the power that it was. I mean, and at the time that I took over the I took over the newsroom of the Washington Post in 2013, the beginning of 2013, there were stories being written in the New York Times about how The Washington Post was sliding into irrelevance and that it couldn't turn itself around.
And then we did turn ourselves around, and we had six straight years of profitability. We had 3 million digital subscribers, and we were doing quite well. So, you know, I'm very skeptical of these predictions of obsolescence and irrelevance. I think there are new models that are emerging. There's no question about it. I think there are some smaller news outlets that will succeed. There are some people will succeed on Substack. But, you know, Substack is if you're paying 50 to $100 a year for a subscription to one person, how many of those can people afford? I mean, even in the field of entertainment, where people are more willing to pay than they are for the news, like substantially more willing to pay, there's a limit to how many subscriptions people will buy to whether they're going to get, you know, are they going to get, you know, Netflix or Amazon Prime or Hulu or whoever, one of the other Peacock or you know what? All the other services, Max and all of these things. And they've already seen a consolidation and a scaling back that people say, I just can't afford all these subscriptions. So if that can happen to entertainment companies, why wouldn't that happen to Substack? I mean, how much are people going to pay to just get the content of one, the content of one person?
So you think that in the media system, as it develops, there will still be a lot of space for, investigative reporting, which is very expensive.
Yes, I think so. I mean, I think that there is an opportunity there and that there's still space for it. I think look what we saw at the Washington Post when I was there, is that's what people that's what drew people to The Washington Post. That's why they purchased subscriptions because they. When we asked them what they most valued and we saw what they most valued because we could see what they were reading and where they were spending their time. Well, it was three things politics, investigations, and a range of opinions. Those were the three pillars. And for us, and when we did major investigations, it brought more subscribers to us. So, so I do think there's a great opportunity there. And frankly, now, for example, in the non-profit sector in the United States, ProPublica is doing quite well. And it focuses entirely on investigations and it's trying to expand out to the states as well and do investigations at the state level. And there is a, there is a substantial base of support for that. And, and you see, like in Pennsylvania, I did a recent fundraiser for something called spotlight PA because some of these news organizations are using the term spotlight. It's very flattering. And, and they're having quite a bit of success. They've raised money, they raised money from people in Pennsylvania. They raise money from foundations. They're now doing collaborations with other traditional news outlets. And there's a lot of public support for that and gratitude for it. So yes, I do think there's an opportunity for that.
So this podcast is about, news innovation. In 2013, Jeff Bezos took over the post, and swiftly built or started building a new publishing system for, basically online publishing, I guess, focused on it. Tell me how that went and what was the vibe on the, on the floor with other editors.
Well, I think at the time, you know, we were all interested in developing new lines of business. We had a terrific chief technology officer at the time, Shailesh Prakash, who subsequently went to Google and has now moved on from Google. And, he saw we were needing so many things in our newsroom to be sort of cutting edge. Jeff Bezos was really focused on us having leading edge technology that he saw an opportunity to create essentially a CMS. He was creating a CMS for us. He might as well try to sell that. And they did acquire a lot of clients and they have acquired a lot of clients. I think the issue of profitability has always been somewhat elusive for them. And, and I think I don't know where they are now, but I think my understanding is it's in the roughly break even territory or things like that, but I don't have any inside knowledge of it. And, and so, you know, I think it's a, it's a difficult business. It's labor intensive, it requires constant support for all of the clients. Many of the clients, by the way, were not in the news business. They were commercial enterprises. And so.
But how did the journalists and the editors handle such a sophisticated new system?
I think pretty well. I think that people, there were a lot of tools that we wanted, they developed those tools for us And one example was that we had changed our, we, we had changed the rhythm at which we published stories. So we looked at, you know, what were the times of the day that people were most likely to read us? Obviously, as soon as I got up in the morning, as soon as they took a lunch break, and then right after dinner, those were natural and obvious. And so we tried to publish according to that schedule. And, but we needed to remind people that they had a deadline coming up. So we built, they built a tool. That was, that I asked for a tool that would send people a note that they had their deadline coming up so that they would get their story done and they built that tool. You would put in a time when the story was due into our system, then that reporter would be reminded that they had a deadline and they called it, unbeknownst to me, without any consulting consultation with me, they called it the Marty bot. And they put my picture on it. And so every time somebody was reminded that they had a story due, they would get a Marty bot with my picture, which I guess was supposed to be terrifying. I don't know whether it was the note or the photo that was terrifying. Maybe both together were particularly terrifying, but as long as it had its intended result and I think it mostly did. That was a good thing.
But it didn't.
Make you very popular in the newsroom, probably.
There are many other things I did that didn't make me very popular as well.
So in your book, you write a beautiful line that newsrooms routinely suffer from a strong gravitational pull back toward what used to be at the expense of what needs to be. So how did you manage to get the newsroom so far in your digital turnaround?
I had a lot of frank conversations with people. First of all, telling them quite bluntly what we needed to do. I remember one political reporter who wanted me to explain to her this so-called digital thing. And that was in 2013. And I thought that was amazing that we were talking about a digital thing in 2013. We went to a cafe and I said I was looking outside the window. She was looking inside. I said, well, tell me. Look around. Anybody reading a physical newspaper? She said, nobody. I said, anybody looking at the phone. She said, yes, pretty much everybody. I said, great, now look out on the street. Do you happen to notice that half the people walking by are not actually looking where they're going? They're actually looking at their telephone, at their cell phone? She said yes. I said, great, I'm finished with our discussion. That's how they wish to receive information. You can't. You may want to write it on a piece of paper, but that's how they wish to receive it. So I have frank discussions. Then, you know, obviously we started sharing metrics and, you know, it wasn't a rigid system. We looked at people who were, performing really well online, and we made sure that even if they weren't, writing that much for the paper itself that they were rewarded financially for their for their work, that they got good raises and things like that. And we looked at people who were underperforming, who should have been performing at a much higher level, but were substantially underperforming the vast middle. We didn't pay much. We didn't pay much attention to. But when there were departments that were substantially underperforming, we had huge discussions with each of those department heads, and we also had a system whereby we asked with our digital team, with some of the digital leaders, we had, we developed with them, every department needed to develop, every department needed to develop a digital game plan. And we worked with every department head to develop, develop their digital game plan.
And.
To look at metrics themselves as.
Well, look.
At metrics, come up with ideas, implement those ideas, and then be measured against those.
Sounds great.
And you said some very interesting things in your speech about how we should develop digital journalism even more. You mentioned a few ways in which we have to develop it. Could you.
Yeah.
Well, I think that, look, I mean, I think the world, with younger people in particular, the attention span is substantially shorter. And we can see that by their use of TikTok. I remember somebody telling me that there was about a TikTok video. She said, well, they get their information in 30s. I said, no, 30s is very long for a TikTok video. So, we have to keep that in mind. And so I think that we need to figure out how to, as I like to put it, turn the dinner entree into a tasting menu so that people get a feel for what the story is about and maybe entice them, wet their appetite for, for more information, so they'll read more, more deeply. I also think that we live in a much more visual world today. Young, younger people are getting their information in a much more visual in a, in a, in a visual form, and not just in text. And we need to adapt. We need to adapt to that. So those are some of the ideas.
And you also spoke about authenticity because this is a problem we as institutions are struggling with. People don't trust us anymore because. And the. And the alternative information sources like bloggers and video bloggers, they are like influencers are more authentic.
Yeah. It's appeared they appear to be more authentic, you know, and I, I think there's a distrust of institutions generally, in our societies today, we are an institution. We can't avoid that. That's just who we are. But I think we need to figure out how to communicate more effectively and with greater authenticity. We live in a time where people are questioning not only our authority, but our authenticity. And so we need to recognize that we can learn from influencers. And, because they're having a lot of success and they appear to be a lot more like the readers we're trying to reach. We need to speak to people more informally. We need to speak to them more visually. We need to speak to them as if we were having a, as if we were having a conversation with a family, with a family member or a friend, as opposed to like the voice of God as we, as we like to used to like to call it this voice of authority. And so, speak to them in, in a way that they would talk to anybody on the street and, and we could deal with complicated subjects that way because, you know, if I were, you know, talking to my mother about economic what's happening in economics, I would try to distill it so that she could understand it because she wasn't a was not an economist.
So, Marty, what would you say are the three biggest innovations at the Washington Post during your tenure? And, which one are you particularly proud of that still stands today?
Well. Let's see. What do I need?
I mean, it's light years ago, like four years.
Yeah. You know, so much time has passed. Well, first of all, we hired a lot of people who didn't come out of print newspapers. They didn't care if their story appeared in the newspaper. They didn't care if they certainly didn't care if it was on the front page or in the paper at all. They were very attuned to, to, to metrics to whether they were connecting with their audience and they would workshop their headlines to make sure which headline works better. And, and so hiring those people and having them right at the time, blogs were a thing and they were writing their blogs and they would write about subjects that were keenly keen interest to young people in particular, like, internet culture, the dark web, things like things of that sort. So that was very important to incorporate that, that informal conversation as a regular thing on our website. Secondly, we created an overnight team, that they worked from about 10:00 at night till 6:00 in the morning. Not ideal hours for anybody, but they were incredibly effective at the theme of that. That team was tomorrow's news today. They would anticipate overnight what would be the story that people would want to know about next. And then they'd do it right away. And as a result, those stories were just tremendously, tremendously effective. Third, you know, we talked about this earlier is that we changed our entire publishing schedule to, to meet the rhythms of, of people to shift away from the newspaper publishing schedule, which is usually, you know, people would turn in their story at 7:00 at night, they'd get edited.
Finally, it would be published at 10:00 at night. Well, that's when people are going to sleep. They're not going to be reading your story. So, except maybe in Spain and Latin America, where they start eating dinner at about 10:00 at night. But in most places, in many other places it's different. So, so we did that. We, so there were a whole bunch of, there were a whole bunch of innovations along those lines that we did. And in terms of trying to change the culture of the newsroom and we incorporated, we put a huge emphasis on visual storytelling. Not just in the area of video, but in the area of information graphics and interactive graphics. Because so many stories, particularly complex stories, can be told more effectively with an interactive graphic than they can be told with text. And so the question is, let's use the tool that is most effective for telling the story, not worry about whether it's text or video or audio or whatever. Which one is the most effective for telling this story and then telling it?
Yeah. Yeah. So my follow up question would be this. Would it be fair to say that, during the, that the first presidency of Donald Trump completely, absorbed basically all the attention and energy of the post. You accomplished a lot, gained massive amounts of subscribers, but afterwards the post experienced a drop back. Looking back, looking back, what, what have you neglected in that time? And what would you have done differently that might have prevented this afterwards?
Yeah. Well, I addressed that in my book in the epilogue to my book. Because, we started the post, started to slide back. You know, right about 2018, I mentioned to my publisher that, you know, there was a good chance that Trump might not be in office again. The Republicans had lost the Congress. And so much of our traffic and our subscriptions were driven by politics and investigations. And if Trump weren't there, then what would we have to, to drive our, our growth? And that we needed to diversify what we had. And, that, by the way, our primary competitor, which was the New York Times, had already begun to do that in a very, very substantial and impressive way. They had spent tens of millions of dollars developing a cooking app that was very good, leapfrogging a lot of the cooking magazines that were out there, which were not digitally oriented. Mhm. They had taken their world-famous crossword puzzle, and used that as a first step toward developing an entire initiative of word games. And that's been hugely successful for them. And that was coming. And I knew about that. And I mentioned that. And then, of course, they had acquired a product recommendation service called Wirecutter, which allows them they get traffic, they get advertising, they get a transaction fee on everything that's bought through that site. So I said, look at what they're doing. And none of this has anything to do with news. Nothing. It has to do with injecting themselves, insinuating themselves into the daily lives and the daily routines of ordinary people. And what are we going to do? Yeah. And I urged that we bring Bezos in for a big strategic discussion because, A he would have some ideas about how we should think about it, and B, he would have to finance it because we were 100% owned by him.
We didn't issue stock. We didn't issue debt. The money would have to come out of his pocket, however deep those pockets are. And so but he never did that. He didn't bring him in for that discussion. We did diversify some degree to some degree, but not to the same extent as The New York Times. What the New York Times. You know, when Bezos acquired the post, he talked about reconstituting the bundle, meaning newspapers used to be a bundle because people came to the newspaper for the advertising they had where to buy a car, where to sell things, where to look for their stocks, to look at their sports scores, to look at, you know, comics, you know, you name it all of these things. And it was a bundle. And Bezos said we need to reconstitute the bundle. And he was mocked for that by all the supposed geniuses about the internet. They said, well, in the area of the internet, you go point A for this, point B for that nobody. Nobody's interested in the bundle. Well, guess what? The New York Times started to reconstitute the bundle. And, and guess who didn't? The media property owned by Jeff Bezos himself. We did not reconstitute the bundle. And that was the fundamental failure, is that we did not diversify for a time when the level of interest in politics, and was going to be substantially diminished. And that was a big mistake. And that was the fundamental mistake that was made.
Was there any reason why he did not answer your call?
I don't know.
You don't know.
Well, Marty has been very inspiring to listen to your adventures and also your recommendations because you, you managed to make a very modern, journalism brand out of the Washington Post, sticking to old traditions, what was known for. So, this is, probably of great interest to, to people here in the Netherlands and to all people who are involved in renewing journalism.
Thank you.
Yeah. Great. Thanks for having me.
Yeah. Thanks for being here.