Welcome to new subscribers today from The United Nations, Axios in Kansas, Yahoo, Mediahuis in Luxembourg, big time investors Vanguard in London, researcher Edentify in Sydney, Salesforce, the New Zealand Olympic Committee, the senior leadership at Hearst in New York, ScalePost in San Francisco, ProRata.ai in Washington, Penske in LA and many more…
I have a treat in store for you today, as Chris Duncan and I have a heavyweight on the pod.
Marty Baron is a newsroom leader who spent two decades walking straight into the storms that shape modern journalism.
As executive editor of The Washington Post, he guided the paper through a once-in-a-generation transformation: The Bezos acquisition, the shift to mobile, the reinvention of digital, and a political era where the President of the United States openly attacked the Press.
Under his leadership, the Post became a Pulitzer machine - from national reporting to investigative breakthroughs, public service, national security, criticism, and explanatory journalism.
And before that, his team at The Boston Globe exposed systemic abuse in the Catholic Church that also won a Pulitzer - a story told in the Oscar-winning movie Spotlight.
Baron has warned that “waves of technology are eroding our foundation” but he’s equally said technology brings the chance to reinvent the craft.
I asked him to come on the podcast to share his advice for how today’s leaders should:
Hold hold the line on integrity, under political and financial pressure
Keep reporters focused when platforms shift under their feet, and
Why he believes press freedom is not a slogan but the operating system of democracy.
Let’s get into it.
Ricky: Marty, thanks so much. I read back through years of your comments to prepare for today and one really stood out.
It’s not one of your most famous, but it spoke to me.
You told journalism students at Utah Valley University: “I don’t think we can afford not to be optimistic about the future of journalism. I’ve never seen anybody succeed by expecting to fail.”
I see this in many newsrooms. An expectation to lose. That Big Tech can’t be stopped. Politics doesn’t work. AI is a death knell.
The leadership seem defeated, resigned, defensive, closed-minded. What’s your advice?
Marty: Well, I don’t think we have any choice, to tell you the truth.
It’s very important that our profession succeeds, that our industry succeeds, so I think we have to focus on the opportunities and not just the problems.
This is a philosophy of mine that goes back some time. When I first became an editor, I was floundering as to what that actually meant. What I was supposed to do?
I had been a reporter before. I knew what to do then; report the story, write it, try to write it well. I had my byline on it and there I was, and I moved to the next thing. It was this clear sense of achievement.
When I became an editor, I was struggling to figure out what management meant.
The one book that I read was by Peter Drucker. It’s probably the only management book that I’ve read that actually I paid any real attention to, to tell you the truth.
And it was extremely helpful to me. One of the points that he made there is that an organisation needs to focus on the opportunities, not just on the problems.
I think we always need to focus on the opportunities, and there always are opportunities, even though we may not recognise them at the time, but we need to find them.
It’s important that we have a sense of achievement, that we can achieve things, and we not just despair because of the problems we face at the moment, no matter how immense they are. And they are quite substantial these days.
I think most people, and most leaders, would realise and understand that sentiment.
Ricky: The question is, where do you find the courage to do it?
Marty: Well, I wanted to keep my job. That was important. So if I didn’t muster the courage to figure out how to succeed, then I would have lost that job, and I don’t know what I would have done otherwise.
The second thing was that I needed to meet the expectations of not only my bosses, but the people who worked for me.
They wanted to succeed. They had careers ahead of them. And on top of that, one of the things I studied in college in addition to journalism was business. I got an MBA.
I thought I understood the business and how businesses change. So there was that.
And I was actually genuinely excited about the opportunities in digital, no matter how much of a challenge they posed to us.
I saw how we could reach more people. I saw how we could tell stories in different ways that were in many ways more effective than traditional text and still images.
And it wasn’t so much a matter of courage, but a matter of excitement that maybe we could do something really special there and reach more people than we ever had before.
Which is true, we do reach more people than we’ve been able to reach before.
Chris Duncan: Do you remember the first thing that you saw for digital news that gave you your a-ha moment, when you first realised the opportunity?
Marty: I’m not sure I can point to the first instance of that to be honest with you. Initially, I was, like many people, in a state of mourning.
I had grown up in traditional media and I saw a lot of what I had dedicated my career to just disappearing or failing. I wasn’t exactly sure what the path was.
But then, you know, I came to the thought process of mourning a little bit. When you mourn a family member, or a friend who’s passed away, it’s fine to do that. You should do that.
But then you have to move on and you have to live your best life possible.
I came to the conclusion that we have to find fulfillment and stay true to our core values.
But find new ways of communicating and accept that we live in a new world and we not only have to adapt, we’re going to have to embrace it and succeed at that.
Then I set the mourning aside and said, we’re moving on. I don’t remember exactly but I could see it when I was working at The Boston Globe.
I started there in the summer of 2001. The internet had already had a tremendous impact on our business.
But I saw how we were reaching many more people, and we were able to adapt new storytelling methods that were very exciting.
We were beginning to use video. Social media, of course, came into existence in about 2007, 2008. And with Facebook and Twitter and all of that.
At the time, I was more excited about social media than I am today, to tell you the truth.
But there was an opportunity for us to present ourselves as real human beings, not just as an institution.
There was an opportunity to connect more directly with our audience. There were ways of just communicating stories that were potentially more effective than the traditional methods that we had relied upon.
Ricky: So can I shorthand that to say that technology should be viewed just as a delivery platform, while the journalism itself is foundational? Is that a fair way to explain what you’re saying?
Marty: Yeah, I think so. It’s also a tool for us. A delivery platform, and I came to the conclusion that we needed it to deliver journalism.
But that was also going to change the way that storytelling was going to need to be done, and we needed to recognise that it had changed over the decades, over the centuries…
As a matter of fact, if you look back at the newspapers back a couple of centuries ago, they’re very different from the newspapers that we had in the year 2000.
So we were always changing, and media always changes. Look at how radio came into existence and how different it was from storytelling than text in print, and then television.
Of course the way you told stories on television was different from the way you told stories on radio, which was different from the way you told stories in print.
And then along came the internet, and we were kind of telling stories the very same way we had told them in print, except that we were doing them in a digital form.
I came to realise that it’s a new medium. A new platform. It’s a new way of distributing.
And because of this technology, people are consuming the information in a very different way than they did before.
If the ways that people are consuming information is changing, then the way that we deliver that information has to change as well.
And we just needed to figure that out. What do we actually need to do in order to connect with people more effectively?
Ricky: Can I ask a nuanced question? In recent years, as newsrooms have come under increasing financial pressure, the focus of many leaders has been to keep the lights on.
That means they have focused very much on managing up to the shareholders, and making sure they are delivering a story that there’s a sustainable model for news.
I think that’s maybe distracted them from managing down to their teams and thinking about the product. Do you think that’s a fair criticism?
Marty: Well, it depends who you’re talking about in these organisations. I certainly think that when we were owned by public companies, there was clearly an emphasis on the corporation’s part on delivering higher stock prices, better dividends and maintaining those dividends.
I think it was very short-term oriented and much to the detriment of our news organisations. We were not investing adequately in the future.
If you look back - and I’ve made this point many, many times - if you look back at all the technologies over the last several decades, you can’t point to a single development that came from a traditional news organisation.
I can’t think of one. They all came from others - and startups essentially. That should tell us something about our own industry. We weren’t nearly innovative enough.
It’s not as if we didn’t have the money to invest in R&D. We just didn’t do it. We were in a very defensive crouch.
For example, when Craigslist emerged, the newspapers were just trying to be very defensive about their existing classifieds business. They didn’t innovate. We didn’t respond to what Craig Newmark was doing, and we should have.
We should have found other ways to do that.
And time and time again, I think we largely failed to learn the lesson that we need to be the innovators. We need to be out front. We need to be the pioneers. To this day, we really haven’t been.
Ricky: Oh, my goodness. That’s what Chris and I talk about all the time.
Chris: There’s definitely a strong history also, of news organisations starting, but not quite having the conviction to see it through. They’ve maybe gone a bit early.
I remember The Sun had what you would now recognise as a social network with half a million people exchanging text and pictures, and we shut it down.
The business team told us they couldn’t see any way of it making money.
Marty: I worked at The Miami Herald when it launched something called VideoText. Knight Ridder was the parent company at the time.
They had launched it and it was good for them to experiment but it was very expensive because people didn’t have internet connections at the time.
You didn’t have broadband, and it’s the proliferation of broadband that’s really what made all the difference in our business.
So they gave up on it. They were licking their wounds.
And I remember when I was at The LA Times and asked one of the senior executives there about the internet, and he said: Look, they had that video text thing at Knight Ridder…
He was very dismissive about what we really needed to do on the internet. I mean, failure hurts. On the other hand, you have to recognise that failure is not the definitive answer.
Maybe you try again and you try again in a different way.
You may remember that The New York Times actually introduced its first paywall around particular columnists and that failed.
But they came back and they tried again, and then they introduced a paywall again, and it worked extremely well and has worked extremely well for them ever since.
Ricky: It’s fascinating that you did an MBA in business. Do you think that’s important? Do you think it was helpful?
Marty: Well, it was helpful to me in a number of ways in terms of my career.
Very shortly after I went into journalism, there was a need for business reporters. I graduated from college in 1976 then in 1979, the US Federal Reserve deregulated interest rates.
That created a huge market for business journalism. They were selling all sorts of new financial products. People were much more in charge of their own investments.
So that helped.
I was recruited to be a business reporter because I was the only one who evidently had ever studied business.
There were just a tremendous number of openings at the time, and that’s what got me hired at The Los Angeles Times,
Then I went into management, which was pretty early in my career - about seven years after I had started I was hired as an editor.
When I got into the senior ranks, I felt that I could communicate very effectively with people on the business side because I wasn’t intimidated at all by the numbers.
I didn’t have to accept that what they said was true. And in many instances, I didn’t think that they were right.
Just because they were better at putting together PowerPoints than I was, did not necessarily mean they had a better financial analysis than I did or a better sense of strategy.
That’s not to say that I was always right, and I certainly wasn’t, but I can make my arguments on a business level.
And also, as a reporter, I wasn’t intimidated when I spoke to business executives because I could do my own financial analysis on their statements and all of that.
So I just wasn’t intimidated at all, so I think it’s been helpful that way and having a sense of basic economics.
I mean, I took God knows how many economics courses. I took finance courses. Accounting was my real problem, but I took them anyway. I just felt that I knew the field.
I wasn’t an expert in anything by any means. I was a generalist, but I thought it was helpful.
And I thought it was helpful to understand where journalism fit within the framework of the business itself.
I never felt that we as journalists should not be paying attention to the business, whereas a lot of journalists felt it wasn’t their responsibility to even think about the business.
I never felt that way at all.
Ricky: So you don’t subscribe to the view prevalent in many newsrooms that there’s a Church and State divide. Journalists create the product but someone else makes the money.
Marty: No, I don’t.
I don’t think the business side should ever be interfering in the actual journalism. They shouldn’t be telling us what stories to write or how to write those stories.
But we should be communicating and we should understand what our consumers want. We should understand how they want to receive those stories.
I think we really need to understand it and we need to work in the most collaborative way possible without violating our core ethics.
And I think that’s possible. That’s absolutely possible to do.
I gave a speech in 2015 at the University of California that went remarkably viral.
I talked about the big move - the move from traditional journalism to digital.
I described it as if we were moving into a new neighbourhood, or a new part of the country, or even another country.
We had to decide what to leave behind. We had to decide what to learn in our new place. We had to decide what we were taking with us from the old place.
And one of the things that I said that we needed to leave behind was the idea that we don’t communicate with the business people.
We must remove the wall of non-communication, I said, because we really needed to work together to make sure our business was successful.
There were a lot of other things we needed to leave behind, and a lot of things we needed to learn, and there were things that we needed to take with us - in particular, our core values.
Ricky: This is very core to me Marty, so this is a personal question.
All three of us on this call are people who rose from the newsroom floor to be taken into management. We were all commercially realistic people identified as being inquisitive enough to try new things.
All three of us were identified and promoted for that. The question I’ve got though, Marty, is a tricky one.
When you get into that management role, and more so as the head of a newsroom, you need to manage up and down simultaneously.
You have to manage up into management who have very different objectives and the problems that the journalists you manage who you need to do their jobs and stay safe, often in dangerous work.
We’ve all managed that and dealt with that stress. Were you a manage up or a manage down person or have you managed to nail it in the middle?
Marty: Well, there’s another direction there too, and it’s managing sideways.
So to my colleagues who were in charge of, let’s say, circulation, or in charge of advertising, we were at an equivalent level within the organisation.
Managing up was to my publisher, the CEO, and even further up to the owner, who ended up being Jeff Bezos, shortly after I arrived at The Washington Post.
So a lot of management going on. I tried to manage in all directions.
I thought it was really important that I manage in a variety of ways.
First of all, I needed to understand what it was we were trying to achieve in a business sense.
I also needed to be able to communicate what we were doing in an effective way to the senior level so that they understood what was happening in the newsroom.
They didn’t always really understand newsrooms, certainly not as well as I did, or as much as I would have hoped or as much as I felt they should.
Then I needed to be a translator of our corporate objectives to a staff that didn’t speak in corporate jargon.
I tried to be effective at speaking with people about the kinds of things that we needed to achieve.
When you talk about digital, for example, I remember very distinctly when I first got to The Washington Post, one of the terrific political reporters there asked if I could explain the digital stuff to her.
We went to a coffee shop next to our office and I said: Look around. Do you see anybody with a print newspaper in this coffee shop? She said no.
I said, do you see anybody looking at their mobile phone? She said yeah, pretty much everybody.
OK, I said, now look out on the street. Do you happen to notice that half the people who are walking by, even as they’re walking, are looking at their phone? She said yeah.
I said, OK, well, I’m pretty much done with my explanation of the digital stuff because I can’t force these people to read a print newspaper. They prefer to get their information in a digital format, particularly mobile.
You’re incredibly talented. You know your field well. You write well. You have great sources.
Unfortunately though, you are not going to be seen as the authority if we don’t adapt to digital, because somebody else who’s not as sourced or as expert or as good as you will because they are delivering the information in a way that people like to read it.
Now, I want you to succeed. There’s no reason that you should fail, and I want you to be the authority. I want The Post to be seen as the authority. That’s why we need to do it.
If we don’t do it, we’re going to lose - and then we’re all out of work.
Those are the approaches that I tried to take and I think that the message got across. And at least I hope it did.
Chris: I was just at a conference where people were talking about how production will change hugely with AI.
But what came out - and you just alluded to it - is that getting a story, having good sources, being able to kind of find a story out of nothing, that’s the bit that changes least.
Marty: That approach to journalism is basically delivering something that’s original and provides unique value is where we need to focus our attention.
AI can’t actually deliver that. It’s entirely derivative of what’s already out there, as opposed to providing something new.
On the other hand, it can exploit very quickly what’s being put online, like instantaneously , so that’s the challenge.
The sort of so-called shoe leather reporting has not changed much and it’s still incredibly necessary, and particularly now,
In the United States, where all digital communications are likely to be subpoenaed by the Trump administration, you really want to develop the sources and have communication with people in either encrypted or non-digital ways. That will often mean in person.
That kind of work then, cultivating those sources, is hugely valuable and really hasn’t changed all that much.
Ricky: Leadership. It comes back to leadership for me again. Many leaders that I speak to say they need to change our funding.
We need to find philanthropic assistance. Or we need to change what we do, find a new space. Or we need a really deep pocketed owner to come in and rescue us.
You were at The Post when Jeff Bezos bought it. What have been, do you think, the positives and maybe even share some of the negatives.
For many it probably looks like a dream come true, but I’d surmise it’s not quite as simple as that.
Marty: Well, it was certainly a huge advantage. I can hardly deny that.
“It was absolutely helpful for Bezos acquire us. He did provide. He talked about providing us with runway. That runway was for taking off, not so much for landing.”
It would give us time and we needed time.
In our business, that’s one of the challenges right now. You need to cut resources to things readers are attached to try to fund more experimental trials.
You don’t know whether people will be attached to them at all. In fact, traditional readers may not like it at all.
His investment in the first couple of years really allowed us to invest in new things without having to sacrifice a lot of the more traditional work that we were doing.
It gave us time to experiment in a variety of ways that actually turned out to be quite successful.
Pretty much everything that we launched, maybe with one exception that I can think of, did not take off. So that was really helpful.
It was helpful to have him there. Obviously, that’s not available to everybody, so other people have to find other ways to go about it.
But you do need resources. You’ve got to find them somewhere, and then you have to make some very hard choices, which I think a lot of media organisations have been doing.
But for some of them, they just did it too late in the scheme of things.
They need to decide what’s proving to be of little value to readers and stop doing that. Accept there will be complaints, but just endure them to invest in the future and not just the past.
Ricky: Jeff Bezos is probably the most successful businessman of his generation. Did he bring kind of a new business discipline too?
Did he insist on tight business discipline, or did the business itself grow that knowing he was looking on?
Marty: It was implicit pretty much, or maybe it was explicit at various points, but it was clear that if something wasn’t working we should just stop doing it.
We did some initiatives and one of them in particular that just wasn’t working so we stopped it after maybe four months. It was clear it was going to be expensive and not produce results.
But a lot of other things worked extremely well, so we were able to continue them. We were able to grow them, but the rules were clearly understood.
First of all, he’s a big believer in metrics. We did become profitable, and we had six straight years of profitability, which was great.
He, of course, didn’t need the dividends, so everything was reinvested. All of our profits were reinvested in our business, which was great.
Ricky: Chris, you’ve run large media companies. Did you get that kind of discipline passed down to you?
Chris: Yeah. We are always aware that it’s not our money. Whenever you go to the board to ask for investment, there’s a clear sense of how you’re going to prove this was worth it.
I’ve worked with very different companies. News Corp is very different from Bauer.
Bauer is a German family business. They have a different methodology for managing risk. News Corp is a little more risk friendly, perhaps.
But each time you know you’re asking to do something that hasn’t been done before, or that is difficult to do.
And you know when to pull the ripcord if, as you say, it’s clearly not working.
Sometimes you think it just hasn’t worked yet - and I think that’s the hardest judgment for innovation in the media.
Is this something that doesn’t work, or have we just not worked out how to make it work yet?
In media, in that first four to six month period, there’s often a loss of confidence. Sometimes you push through and things turn out great and no-one talks about the wobble Others just need to be shut down.
Marty: Yeah. Bezos always said: “You know, human nature is that we are always just trying to fix problems. We’re always like Mr Fix-It.
“And so we obsess, and we work at it, and we work at it, and we work at it, and nothing is working.”
He said we were often better served by finding surprising successes - things that were working even though we were not even paying attention to them.
That was true for us, for example, in the whole newsletter area. We were not paying a lot of attention to it.
We were meeting with him and we were growing, and during our presentation, he put the newsletter note aside on the table.
At the end of everything, he said: “Well, let me come back to this because we’re growing even though we’re not doing anything. So how can we do even better? How can we accelerate it?”
We put together a major initiative on newsletters, which proved to be quite successful. And that is, in fact, how a lot of people receive their information now.
He made very clear, too, I should say, that The Post was not going to be a charity. The objective was always to have it become a sustainable business. He expected us to work towards sustainability, and there would be a discipline for that.
We weren’t going to be the recipient of an endless supply of money from his bank account. We were subject to the same discipline any business would have.
Ricky: I’m going back to leadership.
You were the editor during President Donald Trump’s first Presidency. That was a very difficult time to run a newsroom.
You needed to maintain your ethics and editorial standards amid that, changed ownership, shifting digital sands… How did you balance it all?
Marty: I’m not sure I did keep my balance, or how I did it, but my top priority was the quality of our journalism, and I think that was the right priority.
The quality of journalism was going to determine how many readers and subscribers we had, and whether we were true to our purpose.
As a journalistic institution, our job was to give the public the information it needed, and deserves to know, so the people can govern themselves.
And that was true when it came to Trump, or any other President. I was there for the final two years of the Obama administration.
It was our job to tell people what was going on.
The US President is the single most powerful person in the world. There’s no question about that. And we had an absolute duty to tell citizens what their government was up to.
That meant looking behind the curtain, and beneath the surface, and all of that. That’s what we saw as our mission, and that had been the promise of The Washington Post going back at least as far as Watergate, and even before. We needed to live up to that.
That was the expectation of our readers and we needed to deliver on that, so that’s where I focused my primary efforts.
Then of course, I needed to focus on how we were delivering it and whether we were delivering it in a way that people wanted to receive it.
Ricky: So is it 17 or 18 Pulitzers that your newsrooms have won now?
Marty: Eighteen. The 18th was a little unusual because that Pulitzer was for coverage of what happened on January 6, 2021.
I was there for that event. I retired at the end of February 2021.
The Post did a very big project about that day, which was a terrific piece of work, which was published after I had left.
But the Pulitzer, most of the stories there, with that exception, were published under my tenure. So that’s 18.
Ricky: That’s amazing. You must have a wardrobe full of black tie suits.
Marty: No, I only have one and I try to wear it as infrequently as possible. I can’t stand it. And by the way, the Pulitzer ceremony is not black tie.
Ricky: Ha. That shows that clearly I’ve not won any.
Chris: You’ve shown your hand there, Ricky.
I normally sit outside the newsroom, and one challenge that strikes me is how an editor calibrates the scale of everything to decide which stories need most resources.
Marty: It’s really hard to talk about that in the abstract, but take January 6, 2021. Obviously, that was an insurrection.
I know that The President doesn’t like to say that, and doesn’t like the suggestion he incited it, but I think it was an insurrection and he did incite it.
That was an effort to reverse the result of an election. We had never seen anything like that in this country.
There was no question that was something that deserved enormous resources, and The Post and other major outlets devoted enormous resources to it.
The pandemic would be another. It affected how we worked, where we worked, it affected sports, entertainment, government, medicine.
So on those things, there’s just no question about it.
Beyond that, I think it’s important to step back when you’re thinking about what projects to work on. Look for things that might be a pattern, or might be systemic.
In the case of The Catholic Church at The Globe, the suggestion was not that one priest had abused as many as 80. The Church denied that and we needed to get to the truth.
But beyond that, the question that I posed was whether it was the policy of The Church to cover up these kinds of abuses? Was the cardinal himself complicit in that
Then again, at The Washington Post, a terrific reporter Carol Leonnig, was covering some instances where the Secret Service had screwed up, and there were a couple of cases.
I asked her whether these were isolated cases and whether there was something fundamentally wrong at the Secret Service.
She did more research and came back with several more stories. There did appear to be systemic management problems at the Secret Service.
We did those stories. She won a Pulitzer for that, and the Director of the Secret Service got fired.
Leonnig’s 2014 reporting exposed weaknesses and failures including a bungled response to a shooting at the White House and won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting. She later wrote Zero Fail: The Rise and Fall of the Secret Service.
Marty: The Secret Service is an institution that’s not commonly investigated. It has this great public image. Secret Service people in sunglasses, very fit, all very cool.
But behind that, it’s a bit of a facade. They’re like any other institution. There are all sorts of human failings, so we looked at that. Those are the things we need to keep an eye on.
Ricky: Where do you think journalism’s at today, Marty? You’ve had a couple of years out of the business now, so you can have an unemotional view with a very expert eye.
What’s your perspective of journalism? Is it still doing as good a job as it should do, or does it need to raise its game?
Marty: First we have to define journalism, and I think people are struggling to define it these days.
Communicating information is taking place in a lot of different ways. It’s possible for an influencer to practice journalism now, but it depends what it is that individual is doing.
At the core of it is whether they are practicing a policy of verification of the information that they’re passing along?
If they don’t, then they’re not, in my view, practicing actual journalism - because at the heart of our profession should be verification.
That means we need to discuss what journalism is, and to me, it’s the process of verification.
And look, I think we’re struggling to figure out where we fit in these days. It’s such a fragmented market. There are so many people providing information - or so-called information - or what people think of as information.
I think that the economics are quite difficult. The challenges are enormous.
I don’t think we should be dismissive of the challenges that organisations are facing.
One thing that they’re facing is just distrust of institutions generally. It’s not distrust of journalistic institutions.
It’s true, there is a lot of distrust, but it’s not the only institution that is distrusted. Generally, institutions are distrusted; like big business, institutional religion, in our country The Presidency, Congress, big medicine, you name it.
All of that is distrusted these days.
So we’re grappling with that.
And so I think it’s a very difficult period and searching for direction about what it should be.
And we live in an attention-seeking economy which means a lot of journalists turn themselves into celebrities.
And one way to get attention is to do things that are not really legitimate, to provoke outrage, to go to extremes as opposed to being more sober in our evaluation of what we really know and what we don’t.
And nuance. I mean, nuance just gets completely thrown out the window. And empathy. A lot of good qualities get thrown out.
So I think that traditional journalists are searching for how to survive in an environment like that, and I think the search continues.
What I have said is that I think that anybody who seeks to earn revenue should also bear responsibility. I think that a lot of the tech platforms have skirted that.
They want the revenue and they disclaim any responsibility, and to me, that’s just not a tenable situation. It’s not even moral in my view.
How you manage that is much more challenging. It’s great to say that in principle, but how to execute on that on a day-to-day basis is hugely challenging.
I’ve become deeply skeptical of social media because at the beginning it was a way for us to connect with people as human beings so they could see that we had a personality.
We could engage with them directly. We could reach them in different ways and tell them what we were working on, give some additional insight, that sort of thing.
However, now it’s become a forum for simply performative behaviour, and I don’t think that’s been very helpful.
It’s aggravated polarisation. It accentuated hostilities. It has led to the dissemination of false information, and instantaneous intemperate commentary based on very little, almost nothing.
It doesn’t pay homage to the need for time to figure out what’s going on. It doesn’t acknowledge that there are nuances and complications and all of that.
I hardly participate in social media at all. I’ve withdrawn from it and I find it, to use an overused term, toxic. I just don’t find it illuminating in most instances.
And it’s no place to have an actual discussion with somebody, a reasonable discussion.
I mean, take the contrast between the kind of discussion we’re having here right now. It’s not possible to have a discussion like this on social media.
So how do you have a real conversation? It’s a bunch of attacks, quips and sarcasm, and I find that poisonous, unhelpful, and not something I want to participate in.
Ricky: I’ve found this enormously helpful. I’m going to leave you with this question.
Many followers of this newsletter are leaders of media companies trying to manage in this chaotic environment.
What advice would you have for them? Imagine it’s an empathetic one-to-one, a heart-to-heart with someone who shares your journalistic DNA?
Marty: I think everybody needs, at the senior levels of newsrooms, to understand each other a lot better.
People on the business side; publisher, CEO, need to spend a lot of time with their editor and with the staff to really understand everything.
That means the incredible work that they do, how hard it is, the incredible pressures that they’re under, and also understand and value that quality journalism provides these days.
This is particularly important at a time when you’re not going to be getting a lot of traffic from social media and from search.
It means being able to provide original, high-quality information that’s of true value, whether as new information, or analysis, or commentary.
In a whole variety of ways, you can provide true, extraordinary value, and they need to understand each other.
The same is true for people on the newsroom side. They really need to understand the challenges on the business side, and how technology is changing.
I tell people today that we need to be comfortable with discomfort because instability is a permanent condition of our business. It’s not a passing thing.
We’re much more like tech companies, so we need to imagine that we’re going to change strategies and tactics at least every half dozen years… probably more.
The advent of GenAI is an example of that. Look how quickly everybody had to scramble to question how it changed the business
I think it’s encouraging that a lot of news organisations have worked very speedily to adapt to this, and to embrace it, and to figure out how to incorporate it into their work.
But people on the news side really need to understand that this is just the way things are.
So there needs to be a lot more mutual understanding and people should work at that.
I think that’s the job to be done, but I don’t see that. What’s often missing is that neither side seems to be really working at that.
And by the way, on the newsroom side, I include the unions in that as well, because we live in a time where we all have to work together to make sure our industry survives and thrives.
That is as true of chief executives as it is of union chiefs, so we’re going to have to figure out how to work together, because if we’re working against each other, we’re just not going to succeed.
A lot more communication, a lot more understanding, that’s what I would advise.
Ricky: Thank you. I just spoke with one of the Justice Department lawyers who prosecuted Google for antitrust.
He told me: “I realised as we were going through this process that they move fast and break things and we move slowly to fix things, and it’s not working.”
Marty: Good point.
