New York state of mind
The Globe ponders Baron’s possible departure. Plus, Hersh goes wild, PETA gets censored, and ’BUR kills a media show.
BY DAN KENNEDY
WILL HE stay or will he go? Boston Globe editor Marty Baron has been named as a possible successor to former New York Times editor Howell Raines, who resigned last week. Is Baron interested in the job? He won't say.
IT WOULD BE a fool’s game to assess the likelihood that Boston Globe editor Marty Baron will be named to a top editing job at the New York Times. But there’s no question that he is one of the few plausible candidates to be the Times’ next executive editor or managing editor. And that has members of the Globe staff wondering what it’s going to mean for them if Baron leaves just two summers after succeeding Matt Storin.
"I think it would be kind of a rough period, and maybe it would just reinforce to the staff that we’re sort of a backwater, a farm team," says a Globe source who asked not to be named, referring to the New York Times Company’s ownership of the Globe.
Baron’s name was entered in the Times sweepstakes on June 4, in an online piece by Newsweek media reporter Seth Mnookin, who also identified Los Angeles Times managing editor Dean Baquet as a strong candidate. At the time, Mnookin’s speculation seemed premature; he reported that both men had told him they hadn’t been contacted about the job.
But Mnookin proved prescient. Two days later, following five weeks of turmoil that had begun with the firing of reporter Jayson Blair, executive editor Howell Raines and managing editor Gerald Boyd resigned. And Baron — along with Baquet and several internal New York Times candidates, including columnist (and ex–managing editor) Bill Keller, Washington-bureau chief Jill Abramson, metropolitan editor Jonathan Landman, and editorial-page editor Gail Collins — was mentioned as a possible replacement in virtually every account.
Baron himself is saying little. This past Tuesday he told me that he had decided to stop answering questions about whether he had spoken to anyone at the Times, explaining, "It seems to me to serve no purpose just to sit here every day and say I’ve heard from no one. I’m not going to get into that game."
When asked what impact his possible departure would have on the Globe, he replied, "I don’t think there’s any purpose served in speculating on that prospect at all. Right now I’m here, I’m happy, I’m focused on what I’m doing here, and I don’t want to speculate on what might happen."
The possibility that Baron will move on has prompted considerable discussion in the ranks, even if no one wants to go on the record about it. Suffice it to say that Baron gets a lot of credit for leading the charge on the paper’s Pulitzer-winning coverage of the Catholic Church crisis, for supervising the paper’s excellent reporting on such global news events as 9/11 and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and for bringing a renewed sense of standards and accountability to the paper...
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