Speculation Heats Up Over Who Will Take The Helm At The Washington Post

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In January, Marty Baron announced his retirement, and with it, the end of his time as executive editor of the Washington Post. After 45 years in journalism, nine of them running the Post, Baron stepped down at the end of February, and as the career retrospectives rolled in, so did the speculation as to who may replace him. After all, it is one of the most prestigious jobs in journalism.

In recent weeks, Axios, The Washingtonian, Vanity Fair, and Poynter all published stories speculating about who would take the Post’s top editorial spot.

And on Wednesday, Vanity Fair published another report on the “confounding search” for Baron’s successor, which one insider described as a “journalistic unicorn”: The sought-after candidate needs to be “an editor of Marty Baron’s stature, but one who has a passport with many more stamps and who is much more in touch with the journalists of tomorrow.”

That’s certainly a tall order.

The names mentioned in the Vanity Fair report about potential candidates include: Post interim editor Cameron Barr, national editor Steven Ginsberg, National Geographic editor Susan Goldberg, and New York Times editors Marc Lacey, Rebecca Blumenstein, and Carolyn Ryan.

Post publisher Fred Ryan has said the search for Baron’s successor would be “broad and inclusive,” and would include a “diverse group of exceptional journalists.” Post staff, according to Vanity Fair, have pushed for diversity to be considered in the hiring process.

But of the candidates that have come up multiple times in reports across several publications, the majority are white.

Barr, who took over from Baron on an interim basis, has been mentioned in a few reports as a potential full-time successor. But one insider told Mediaite that that Barr isn’t considered a top contender, and is viewed more as a “solid number two or three.”

One would-be candidate, Kevin Merida, who is Black, was a favorite among current Post staffers, according to Vanity Fair, but is no longer “in the mix.” Merida, who is a senior vice president at ESPN and the editor in chief of The Undefeated, “was encouraged to apply for the job,” Vanity Fair reported, “but he wasn’t exactly courted, at least not in the way one might have expected given all the boxes he appears to tick off: vast experience at the Post and support from former colleagues; stewardship of an innovative digital start-up inside a major media corporation; prominent journalist of color.”

The two potential candidates of color whose names have appeared in multiple stories are Sewell Chan, who is Asian American, and Marc Lacey, the assistant managing editor of the New York Times, who is Black. No women of color have been floated in reports as being considered for the job.

The Post itself has set goals for increasing diversity and inclusion within its ranks. In a July 2020 report on its own “workforce demographics,” the Post said it is “committed to building a stronger culture of diversity and equity.” At the time, 71.2% of the Post’s news and editorial workforce was white, and 77.5% of its leadership was white. These numbers roughly match those of newsrooms overall across the country, which, according to a 2018 Pew study, are 77% white.

The Post has also made some very public efforts at diversity, including tapping Krissah Thompson in July 2020 to be the paper’s first managing editor for diversity and inclusion (and the first-ever Black woman to be named a Post managing editor), and in December, naming Lahaja Furaha as director of diversity and inclusion, a new position at the company aimed at “growing an ever-more diverse and inclusive workforce.”

At this moment, the Post is in a unique position to make a strong statement about its values, and about the value of broadening the range for who is traditionally seen as a newsroom leader. Axios acknowledged that the Post “will serve as a litmus test for how much traditional newsrooms might think outside the box” for leadership roles, and the Washingtonian, noting that a “big percentage” of the names floated as candidates belonged to white people, noted that there is “tremendous pressure on the news biz to make room for people outside the central casting of what a newspaper editor looks like.”

The news industry could be headed for more inclusion and diversity already, as the Pew study also showed that younger newsroom employees are less likely than older ones to be white men, and there is greater gender parity among younger newsroom workers nationwide. To say the search for the next executive editor at the Post is like looking for a “journalistic unicorn” launches the process into the realm of the impossible, but it may just come down to expanding the field of candidates — or, potentially, as Vanity Fair reports, a possible “wild card” candidate picked by Post owner Jeff Bezos himself. “Something we don’t know,” an insider told Vanity Fair, “is whether Bezos has his own candidate.”