>> funding for "overheard" with evan smith is provided in part by mfi foundation, improving the quality of life within our community. and from the texas board of legal specialation, board certified attorneys in your community. experienced, respected and tested. also by hillco partners, texas government affairs consultancy, and its global health care consulting business unit, hillco health, and by the alice kleberg reynolds foundation and viewers like you, thank you. >> i'm evan smith. "the washington post," previously edited the boston globe where he and his colleagues won six pulitzer prizes, journalism's highest honor.

he's martin baron, this is "overheard." >> i guess we can't fire him now. >> the night that i win the emmy. >> being on the supreme court was an improbable dream. >> it's hard work and it's controversial. >> without information there is no freedom and it's journalists who provide that information. >> windows roll down, this guy says, hey, it goes to 11. [ laughter ] >> marty baron, welcome. >> thank you. >> nice to see you. >> it's been fifteen months or so, the big job at the want, grade yourself, how do you think you've done, assess your own work. >> sure, well, i'll grade ourselves as a group, not myself personally, i think the post has done a terrific job. our work, the work that we did on the n.s.a. was at the leading edge of that story. >> and let's hope it's rewarded appropriately at the -- at those moments, it will come soon,

let's hope. >> from your lips to god's ears. >> yeah. >> the work that we did on the governor of virginia, actually led to his indictment, we did work on abuse of tax liens, that was tremendous. great narrative work by one of our outstanding writers about the food stamp program and taking a deep look at that, i think across the board the journalism was outstanding. >> isn't it amazing to talk about journalism in journalism, we spend a lot of time talking about the journalism end of that phrase, you sound like an old school guy talking about journalism. >> i like the word journalism, i detest the word content. >> i'll make a note of that. >> i have to use it with my business colleagues, that's the word they use frequently. but the fact is that if you say content, it's as if you were saying the word stuff, it doesn't have any real meaning,

journalism does have meaning. we're trying to find why things happened, where they're headed, who's behind it, there's a deeper level of meaning, i think the word journalism is very important. >> you've seen if not entirely a certain amount of comfort. maybe it is entirely comfort in moving into a lot of these additional platforms that journalism organizations, news organizations obligated to own these days, it's not just the written word on the printed page, it's video and social media and sort of the whole panoply of things, this is what we do. >> we have wonderful new tools, very powerful new tools, they're not contrary to good journalism. >> you think they're consistent with the kind of story telling. >> they're consistent with story telling. they allow us to do story telling at a much deeper level, use video, give a sense of the person, provide original documentation that people might want to see that actually adds credibility to the work that we do, that engages the audience, that allows them to participate,

that actually uses them as reporting resources for us as well, the public is extremely knowledge about a lot of subjects, more knowledgeable than we are, and we can use them to our advantage to actually tell stories. >> one would be forgiven based on your affect today, you're saying this is a good time to be in the business we're in. >> i think it is a good time. >> a minority position. >> i haven't taken that survey, i don't know if it's a minority position, but i really do feel it's a good time to be in the business, first of all, we're reaching far more people than we've ever reached before. >> across a variety -- >> the washington post has 30 million people coming to its website, that's huge, that's far more than we were able to achieve before. >> that's all good? >> it's all good. as i mentioned, we had story telling tools available to us that we did not have before, so we can extend our reach. we can tell stories in new ways,

tell stories in particularly effective ways, ways that engage a broad audience and i think there are enormous challenges in our business. i'm not denying that. i'm not a polly anna, enormous pressures, i've been subject to them, everybody has been subject to them, they're very difficult, that doesn't mean we don't have a future, that doesn't mean that we shouldt be optimistic, i think we should for a variety of reasons. >> if you come out and you go by the washington post, what you're going to see is opportunity, right? the point of this, the unrest, this turmoil that we live in every day has nonetheless created opportunity for smart young people to come up with new ways of doing things. it's created essentially new job descriptions, at places like the post. that's good thing, and you're comfortable with that kind of evolution. >> i'm excited about that, actually. we have a whole new group of people coming into our business who are digital natives, they grew up -- yep, first generation. >> that's air native language, for people like me, we're

learning that, it shows some times that we're still in the process of learning, for young people, they've grown up with this from the very beginning, they don't know another language, so they kind of speak without an accent in this business and that's an injection of new energy, new knowledge, that we didn't have before, and for them there are tremendous opportunities because we're becoming an entrepreneurial business, we're becoming much more of a technology business, that's very exciting, it creates tremendous opportunities for young people in media at large, if not just the legacy institutions of the washington post, "the new york times," the "wall street journal," we're talking about media institutions that are cropping up that are growing up overnight. >> the competitive set has changed, there are organizations you're competing with who you're considering to be your competition probably who you never thought would be in the water with you. >> it's a far more competitive industry. i often talk about what does it start to take an international

television network, turn on your computer and turn on your cameras. >> the barriers to entry have been oh a little obliterated. >> they see entrepreneurial opportunities, ventures that they can start and we're competing with all sorts of entities that have been in existence for a long, not a long while, google, facebook, twitter, things like that. >> we don't think of them as media companies. >> they are meet i can't companies and they definitely are our competition. >> is the material different between the boston on the globe and the washington post. you spent a dozen years at the globe, had great success. the washington post is the washington post. we're sitting here in the 40th anniversary year of richard nixon's resignation driven entirely by the reporting of the washington post, you can say he had made his own bed, but you caused him to sleep in it. you know, the washington post is one of these national, international kind of cosmic

universal brands, i'm just wondering what that shift for you has been like, or essentially you cover up the name plate and a newspaper is a newspaper is a newspaper. >> sure. well, i was at the globe for a little shy of a dozen years and i think we did tremendous work, i think it's important to remember the tremendous work that was done there, the investigation of the catholic church, the concealment of that abuse for decades be at this archdiocese of boston and the church at a broader level as well, that had an immediate impact but has an impact that continues to this day. so an institution like the boston globe, powerful journalistic institution can have a worldwide impact and it did in that instance, as far as the washington post is concerned, it already has a national -- a national and an international platform, it's one that was certainly established very much in the water gate era and grew from that point and it still does to this day. there's a recognition on my part

that i go to an institution with a storied history. >> big shoes to fill. >> big shoes to fill, but, you know, a history that actually inspires me rather than intimidates me. it gives me a purpose, i already had the purpose, but it's a great motivator as well. >> yet, you told the new republic when you started in this job, that you thought one of the ways in which the post could do a basic work was metro and local. you were talking about the importance of the washington post as a paper for washington, when many of us think about the washington post casually, we think of it as a national brand alongside "the new york times" and "wall street journal," there are few national media brands in print, the post was one, you talked about metro and local, i'll grant you vincent gray has been the gift that keeps on giving in the mayor's office in dc, sadly that gift is coming to an end, with the recent primary results, i can understand where the material is rich, but really ahmet trough and local focus. >> well, i didn't say to the new republic that the washington post --

>> not to the exclusion of everything else. >> what i said is that the washington post needed to be strong in its local coverage. you mentioned washington, d.c., with you we cover the state of virginia. and martin o'malley, the governor there is contemplating the possibility of running for president, we'll see. >> or vice president. >> or who knows what. so we have a great territory to cover, we should be very good at that, i look at this as local coverage as sort of the roots of the tree. any strong tree has to have very strong roots but it has the trunk and it has the branches and the roots for metropolitan newspaper like the post, even though it has aings in aal and international portfolio are in its local coverage. it has to be excellent at that. it also has to be excellent at other things. >> you have to devote the resources to the roots and that is really a question for any editor, anybody in your position these days is finite resources,

even if you're owned by the great bezos as the washington post happens to be. we'll talk about that for a second. the tap is not turned on forever and at all times. you have to think about how do you take the resources available and allocate them n the case of metro and local, that is presumably cheaper coverage to pay for instead of sending something to some far flung place to do international coverage. >> i'm not so sure that's true, i think it's very hard to sort of figure out that equation, because if you're writing about national and international stories, you're reaching a national and international audience, and so, yeah, sure, it's more expensive to do any one particular story, particularly if you have to do a lot of travel but what you get out of it is more likely a larger audience, so -- i don't know what the exact split should be, i don't know if anyone knows. for the washington post we need to do all of that. >> there's metro and local in the conventional sense covering

virginia, maryland and all of that, politics in the nation's capital since is kind of local for you too. it seems like if you didn't own that space or coown it with some other folks, it would be a real failing. how do you think you've done in terms of covering national politics, covering the capitol, it is local for you. >> i think we've done well, i think we have a tremendous political staff at the post, i think they've done a lot of the defining stories in the nation's capital, the n.s.a. is an example of that. the single biggest political -- one of the biggest political topics in the country over the last year has been the issue of security versus privacy as a result of the n.s.a. disclosures. >> yep. >> and we have been at the front of that story. we've been driving that story. there's only one other media organization that has been in there. >> and that would be the guardian. >> that would be the guardian. as you said earlier, competition is now greater, more people to

elbow out of the way, some of that is the folks you've been competing with institutionally, not maybe you but the post for some time, there are new people that have come on the scene, some of them have been people who have a washington post lineage, i'm thinking principally of implicit co, the founders were people that had come from the post, they had come to the ownership of the post at the time and said we would like to do this under the post umbrella, they were told maybe not, so how much has the arrival of folks like politico on the scene made your job different, maybe it's improved it -- >> i do like competition. i think it makes us better. i'm in favor of competition. so, but the fact is i wasn't there -- >> at the time. >> at the time, so i'm a newcometor the post, but the fact is if you actually look at what people read in washington, they read the washington post, the percentage of the people who read politico is actually relatively small, if you look in

the federal government at the number of people who read us versus the -- read politico, we overwhelm them, so we have a bigger preference in covering government and more people are reading us. they're relatively small site by comparison with us, they have something like 6 million unique visitors, when you look at mobile users plus desk top users per month, six to seven million depending on the month. it goes up during a presidential election year, but falls dramatically in nonpresidential election years, we have 30 million unique visitors that come to our site per month, we're about four to five times their size in any month. >> this question before, it seems like -- >> i've certainly anticipated this question before, and -- and the fact is i think sometimes it helps not just to listen to the rhetoric and the boasting but it also helps to look at the facts. >> right. another soon to be competitor of sorts is coming from within your shop and actually this one you

were running the paper, and that is the ezra clein vertical that has been created. i'm fascinated how the business that we're in as evolved over time, it used to be the only brand that mattered were the institutional brand, now the individual brands these days have been more like rocket boosters for the institutional brands, some individual brands like ezra want to be rockets on to themselves, ezra clein somewhat famously came to the post and say i want to start my vertical, he left, people left with him, talk about how you think about that from a competitive standpoint, i guess it's early to tell. >> let me correct you, first of all. he did not come to us and say i want to start my own vertical in the paper. he already had started his own vertical in the paper which we funded to the tune of millions of dollars per year. i'm not sure of a lot of people heard of ezra clein before he was working at the washington post and we funded that

operation. very talented guy. we invested in that, we're investing even more in that. there isn't one thing that we requested for that event venture that we did not fund including 2014. it was not to say i want to start a vertical inside the washington post, what he said is i intend to start a venture outside of the washington post, totally independent, this has nothing whatsoever to do with the washington post, i will be the ceo, i will be the president, i will be the editor in chief. i will select the technology -- the technology that's used and i will select the advertising. i will be in charge of the advertising as well, and what i would like to know is whether jeff bezos would be willing to fund that. that's what happened, not i want to start something or expand something within the umbrella of the washington post. >> of course the perception out in the world is that somehow you let him go, but the reality it sounds like from your description, he was planning to go anyway, it was a question -- >> it pains me to say this, some

times the reporting is not accurate. [ laughter ] so that was not -- that was not accurate reporting. it left a gross misimpression. he did not ask to do anything, the first person he came to at a senior level was me, the first thing he said, i want to start a news organization independent of the washington post, my own news organization and what i would like to know is whether jeff bezos is willing to fund this. jeff bezos had invested $250 million in the washington post with the intention of investing even more in it as he is doing this year. he also has an investment in business insider, and he's increased his investment in the business insider. it's up to jeff bezos if he wants to invest in something else. the truth is, i don't have a venture capital fund available to me, i have my newsroom budget, when somebody comes and says i would like to start this and the amount of money required is 10% of what my newsroom budget is, i'm not able to fund

that, the owner of the company, the person who owns 100% of the company is the only person who can make that decision, and as i said, it was never his intention to start within the washington post, it was always his intention to start outside the washington post. >> so let me reframe the question. you know, i think of this as the ezra cleining of journalism, now everybody wants to be their own entities or a lot of people do. is this a good thing for our business or bad thing. >> i think it's actually a good thing for the business. i think it's a sign of health, actually. i think, you know, more power to him, i wish him the best of luck. i have, you know, it's fine, the fact is there's now capital to start entrepreneurial ventures in the media industry, that's not a bad thing from, the standpoint of the information consumer, that's a good thing, so i don't begrudge anybody that opportunity f. he has the entrepreneurial itch, he wants to do it, try it, find funding, which he has, more power to him, that's great.

i think that's a sign of health in our industry, rather than any other sign of dysfunction. he's hiring young people in particular, and great, that's opportunity for those people, and they will bring their own personality to coverage of the news and public policy, and that's -- that's fantastic, but what he's doing there, he and many of his people were doing at the washington post. >> >> the blog continues. >> the blog continues, we have gov feed, we have the fix for politics, we have world views for international affairs, we're starting new public policy blogs, so all of that remains a vibrant area of coverage for us, it's something he did when he was at the washington post. some of his colleagues were doing at the washington post and it's something that we continue to do and actually expand upon. >> mr. bezos' name has come up a couple of times, let me go there. the joke -- you know, it

shouldn't surprise you, again. >> i'm shocked. >> the fact of his ownership of the post is of some curiosity to people of the world we live in, and outside the world that we live, in the jokes are made, the paper will now be delivered by drones or christmas bonuses will come to people's houses in two day, free shipping. putting all that stuff to the side, you worked for the solsberger's, they're not exactly paupers. what is the difference in working for mr. bezos from what you can tell than the folks you worked for previously or does the ownership enter into the occasion despite his large brand. >> i think ownership makes a difference with respect to our present circumstances. he is very interested in our future, he sees enormous value in the brand of the washington post, correctly in my view. he is making substantial investments. we have started all sorts of initiatives, we're hiring in the

news room alone, three doesn'tsen people, that doesn't include people in the technology area. >> since he arrived. not plan in place previous. >> that's correct. so all of that is positive, he's very much a person who is a strategic thinker. he understands the technology perhaps better than anybody in the world. he understands consumers, extremely well, that's an important part of it too, it's not just a technological play, understanding what the consumer wants. >> audience. >> understanding what consumers. >> consumers in his case are audience. >> but audience suggests sort of an us delivering to them, consumer says it's the focus on what are they really interested in. >> but his innovation in amazon has been among other things to figure out how to connect to people who are potential consumers. >> right. >> and one of the things in the newspaper business, it wrestles with this audience, how do you

reach people in this current environment, his success at that can be translated one hopes -- >> different business than selling books and selling vacuum cleaners and selling all of the things that are available on amazon, which is essentially everything. >> right. >> but it's different in a certain way, but he does bring sort of new thinking to that, and i think very smart thinking and he's willing to ask provocative questions and challenge us, and willing to have us challenge him. >> the post is a legacy news organization which can be used as a negative descriptor. i don't mean it that way. i've been at that awhile, there's other news organizations that have been at this less time and don't have the same tradition that the washington post has infused in this news room, and i wonder if people there, below the level of martin baron are are resistant to the guy -- idea of this guy who doesn't have a journalistic background, who bought the paper, suddenly being a figure

in their lives? has there been any push back against this. >> people revere the previous ownership, the graham family, don graham, people revere the family and its role in that organization appropriately so. they built an incredible organization. talk about the value of the brand, that value of the brand wouldn't exist without that -- >> as much a graham brand as it was a post brand. >> yeah. on the other hand, don graham has admitted they weren't quite sure what to do at this point, this has been a very difficult time in our industry, and he was trying to find a buyer who could bring some new thinking to our industry, and i think that jeff bezos does that, has done that, and that's a plus, he also brings resources. he brings a long-term perspective, he's not looking for a -- let's make an investment in three months that has to pay off or even within the first year it has to pay off, he recognizes we have to experiment, he's talked about

giving us runway, which suggests a long-term horizon. >> if you're a reporter and you hear them talking about a long-term horizon, you've got to think i feel much better about my job. >> absolutely. it doesn't mean forever, but it does mean that we have time to experiment, we have time to try things, we have time to let things settle in and see what we can do. >> yeah. >> and he's supporting that, and i think people are embracing that, i haven't detected any resistance to that at all. >> a year from now, we have a minute left, a year from now, if you're sitting me, what are you going to tell me different than what you told me today. what are your two big goals for the next year out. >> we have essentially two goals, basically, one is digital transformation of our -- of our organization, of our news room and the rest of our organization as well. we've made enormous progress. there hasn't been resistance to that, but we have a lot of things to do. so we want to transform ourselves and become i think in the truest sense a digital organization. and the other is that to be

ambitious journalistically, we talk about a year of ambition at the post, it's important to do the kinds of things we were talking about at the beginning of this conversation, agenda setting journalism, journalism that makes an actual difference, both of those are important to us, and neither can be sacrificed. >> great, you'll have the resources to do it, as youay, an thas a gd thing. marty, good luck. >> thank you. >> we're all watching you with nervousness and hope. your optimism needs to be contagious for the next of us. thanks very much. thank you. [ applause ] >> we'd love to have you join us in the studio, visit our website at klru.org/"overheard" to find invitations to interviews, q and as with our audience and guest d a archive of past interviews. >> when you have a shooting at ft. hood, the first thing we do is report there's a shooting at

ford hood, we don't know have much about it, but we're going to find out more about it, as we do get that additional information, we post that, the important thing is to make sure that we don't post information that is in fact incorrect. >> funding for "overheard" with evan smith is provided in part by mfi foundation, improving the quality of life within our community and from the texas board of legal specialization, board saturdayified attorneys in your community, experienced, respected and tested. also by hillco partners. texas government affairs consultancy, and its global health care consulting business unit, hillco health. and by the alice kleberg reynolds foundation. and viewers like you. thank you.