Executive Editor Marty Baron expanded the Washington Post’s newsroom during his eight years in charge.
Photo: Andrew Harnik/Associated Press
Washington Post Executive Editor Marty Baron said he would retire at the end of February after an eight-year tenure in which he expanded the newsroom and its reach and oversaw aggressive coverage of the Trump administration.
During a nearly 45-year career in journalism, Mr. Baron led several news organizations including the Miami Herald and the Boston Globe, where he oversaw the team that exposed a sexual-abuse scandal in the Catholic Church.
“At age 66, I feel ready to move on,” Mr. Baron wrote in a note to Post employees, which the company published online.
Mr. Baron took the top job at the Washington Post in January 2013, months before the newspaper was acquired by Amazon.com Inc. founder Jeff Bezos.
He helped lead the Post’s aggressive digital push: It now has three million paying digital subscribers, according to a spokeswoman. The newsroom nearly doubled in size during Mr. Baron’s tenure and now counts over 1,000 journalists, up from 580 when he arrived.
In a memo to Post staffers on Tuesday, Chief Executive Fred Ryan said that the news organization would soon launch a search for a successor, which he said would “be a broad and inclusive one.”
In an Instagram post, Mr. Bezos thanked Mr. Baron for his work and wrote that the paper’s success in recent years “would not and simply could not have happened without you.”
Write to Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg at [email protected]
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