Marty Baron Will Retire From The Washington Post

Martin Baron, the executive editor of The Washington Post who also led The Miami Herald and The Boston Globe in a storied journalism career, will retire at the end of February, the publication announced Tuesday.

Mr. Baron said in a note to The Post’s newsroom that he had committed to staying through the presidential election and would retire on Feb. 28.

“At age 66, I feel ready to move on,” he wrote.

Mr. Baron said he had joined the paper with “a reverence for The Post’s heritage of courage and independence and feeling an inviolable obligation to uphold its values.” He said the news staff had delivered “the finest journalism” and was proud of the newspaper’s ambitious work.

“You stood firm against cynical, never-ending assaults on objective fact,” he said.

Mr. Baron has led The Post since January 2013. He joined after a stint as the top editor of The Boston Globe, which under his leadership won a Pulitzer Prize for an investigation into sexual abuse in the Catholic Church. The series of stories became the basis of the 2015 Oscar-winning film “Spotlight,” in which Mr. Baron was played by Liev Schreiber.

Mr. Baron said The Post was “well positioned for the future,” with a greater readership, broadened coverage and more journalists that it had on his arrival.

“We have now created a truly national and international news organization,” he said.

The Post now has about 3 million digital-only subscribers, up by nearly a million in the last year. Its newsroom has grown, from 580 journalists when Mr. Baron arrived to more than 1,000 budgeted for this year.

Mr. Baron took charge of the newsroom when The Post was owned by the Graham family, the caretakers of the paper for three generations.

When he joined, The Post was struggling financially as it dealt with the battles all newspapers were facing: declining print ad revenue, plummeting circulation and new competition from digital news outlets. In August 2013, Jeffrey Bezos, the founder of Amazon, bought it for $250 million. Since then, the combination of Mr. Bezos’s resources and Mr. Baron’s newsroom know-how has revived a newspaper famous for its reporting on the Watergate scandal that toppled President Richard M. Nixon.

With Mr. Bezos, the world’s richest man, in the role of deep-pocketed newspaper mogul, and with Mr. Baron leading the reporters and editors, The Post won 10 Pulitzer Prizes, including the 2020 Explanatory Reporting Award for a series on the effects of climate change and the award for national reporting in 2015, 2016 and 2017. It shared the 2018 National Reporting Award with The New York Times.

“Please don’t lose sight of how hard our gains as a commercial enterprise were to achieve. They would be easy to lose,” Mr. Baron wrote. “In 2013, when our outlook was dire, we were given a second chance. We took it, engineering a turnaround with focus and creativity.”

He acknowledged that more work remained to be done at The Post, including increased diversity in the newsroom and a deeper understanding of the communities it covers.

“From the moment I arrived at The Post, I have sought to make an enduring contribution while giving back to a profession that has meant so much to me and that serves to safeguard democracy,” Mr. Baron wrote.

In a note to all employees on Tuesday, The Post’s publisher and chief executive, Fred Ryan, said that though he had known the day of Mr. Baron’s retirement would one day come, it “does not lessen the emotion we feel.”

“Under Marty’s eight years of newsroom leadership, The Washington Post has experienced a dramatic resurgence and has soared to new journalistic heights,” Mr. Ryan said.

The Post will have a “broad and inclusive” search for a successor for Mr. Baron, Mr. Ryan said, and would consider internal and external candidates.

“Please know that I view this as one of the most consequential responsibilities I will have as your publisher,” he said.

Mr. Bezos weighed in on Mr. Baron’s planned retirement with an Instagram post on Tuesday that addressed his departing editor directly: “Our success these past several years would not and simply could not have happened without you,” he wrote.

He also described Mr. Baron as “both swashbuckling and careful,” saying he had led the paper with integrity, “even when it was exhausting.”

This is a developing story. Check back for updates.