Baron is executive editor of The Washington Post.

DL: Talk to me about what’s happening at the Post.

Baron: Almost all of our initiatives are oriented for digital growth and digital transformation: How do we get more readers, more on the national level, and more younger readers coming into our site, because if we don’t have younger readers, we don’t have a future.

That’s the objective. All the things we have created are oriented toward generating digital traffic, having people come back to us more often, and ideally spending more time with us. We are also thinking about, and this is a separate issue, how to get more people to pay for us. And that is not the same thing as getting more people to read us. That’s two separate things: one, how do you get people to read, and two, how do you get people to pay?

What are the bases for the initiatives that we have taken? We looked at what we’ve done already that has been successful and tried to move on things that have been disproportionately successful on the Web. We already had some blogs that were highly successful: The Fix and Post Politics for politics, Wonkblog for economic and policy matters, The Switch for technology policy, GovBeat for state and local government. All of those were producing disproportionately high traffic for the number of people we had doing them. The question was: What are the ingredients of these blogs that make them successful? The fundamental ingredient is having a person writing for them who writes for the Web, not for a newspaper and then we’re just putting it on the Web. It’s the recognition that the Web is a different medium in the same way that television is different from newspapers, and radio is different from television, and if you were giving a speech, it would be different from all of those three.

DL: That’s actually a breakthrough.

Baron: It is a breakthrough. A good example is The Atlantic, which has been able to establish a substantial Web business with people who know how to write for the Web and a good use of charts and graphics and videos and aggregation. Very important is a writing style that works for the Web, that’s conversational, that’s accessible, that is smart, is voicy but is not always an outright opinion and not an editorial—but it has a personality. You can sort of get a sense of the personality of the writer, as opposed to having no personality and being totally institutional. That’s what we are aiming for. That, and someone who will take advantage of everything out on the Web and use that, verify it, or point to it to help the reader navigate these subject areas. We went out in very deliberate fashions to hire people who can do this.

That was one thing. Number two is: What are other people doing that has been really successful? Huffington Post has been hugely successful at having outside contributors. They started that way, and it has allowed them to get ample traffic through the contributions of other people that cost them nothing or very little. Can we do that in a smarter way? There are people who write for The Atlantic as well. The Washington Post is a great platform for that. It is ideal, it’s right here in the nation’s capital, you write for the country and the world. Why can’t we do that? We are doing it. We started something called PostEverything, which is a network of outside contributors, and we’ve had hugely successful posts. Our most successful post to date ran last week.

DL: What was it?

Baron: A good headline is an important factor. The headline was: “This is what happened when I drove my Mercedes to pick up food stamps.”

DL: That was from a contributor? How did you pick her?

Baron: She wrote it as an op-ed. Everything was going great in her life, and she lost her job and her husband lost his job and about that time she was having twins and they had a big mortgage and everything fell apart. They needed food stamps. They are now off food stamps and both have a job. Originally it was written as an opinion piece, and our editor said to write it as a personal narrative and tell us your story. She did that, and they worked with her on it. We posted it and it did very well, and then Yahoo picked it up and it was a fire hose and it went totally wild for a week. It was a megahit.

DL: You go back and see what were the component parts of the megahit? Headline? Personal narrative?

Baron: It hit all the right sweet spots—between people who condemn her versus those who see themselves in her.

DL: Or who believe that is what food stamps are for. That safety net for that short period of time when you need it.

Baron: Or those people who can see that happening to them. The whole thing with the Mercedes is that her Mercedes was totally paid off. Was she supposed to sell it? What would you get for it?

DL: There is an argument to be made.

Baron: The judgments were made because she drove her luxury car to get the food stamps.

We have a story now about “Why I’d never adopt a shelter dog again”; we will see if it will take off. I’m sure we are going to have outrage pouring down on us. She had always gotten dogs from shelters, but her last two had lots of illnesses and she has constantly been taking them to the doctor.

DL: Do you have a team that goes looking for these things? Going back to what do journalists need to do?

Baron: That is one of our top stories on our home page. It’s going to do really well, I’m going to predict. So how do we find it? The one on the Mercedes came to our op-ed people who are involved with our PostEverything site, and they sent it over. We have great editors there, and this is an example of why editors make a huge difference. They said this story had potential that hadn’t been realized, and they coached her on what to do.

DL: You have a staff that knows to look for these things. Is that different?

Baron: We have teams, both overnight and daytime, that are out looking for the best stories on the Web. [Post owner Jeff] Bezos has talked about using the gifts of the Internet. There are newsrooms all over the place doing good work. We don’t have to invent them here. Let’s find those. Let’s do the reporting, let’s get additional context, let’s write it better. That makes a big difference: how to write better. We had a piece today about that crater in Siberia. We aren’t the first people to write about it, and we didn’t go to Siberia. Overnight we worked on it and pulled together what people had said about this and made sense of it, and then wrote about it in a particularly engaging way. Same thing about the people who walk on their hands. That story is doing extremely well. We pulled together the theories about what happened, and now someone has written a journal article saying that’s not right. It was the result of an illness and restoring their balance. That was done overnight. They work 10 p.m.-6 a.m. Then we have a crew that picks that up during the day that looks for great stories or major breaking stories, and we are populating that throughout the newsroom or those quick reactions or go find a great story. Say there is a great story on the West Coast but we don’t have a correspondent. We can’t always wait to get a correspondent out there, but we can put someone on it here that can use the Web to get the information we need.

There are a number of blogs. We are developing ideas that appeal to a wide, national audience. We have one on the culture of the Internet about the weird and bizarre things that happen on the Internet. We developed The Style blog about pop culture. We have launched a military affairs blog that is right in our sweet spot.

DL: How’s that doing, since it’s more specialized?

Baron: It’s doing well. It’s an audience we are particularly interested in and want to build. Most people are very interested in the military. We had a post the other day about the new bullet that has been developed. Watching that video is unbelievable. People have watched that video over and over.

DL: You’ve been doing journalism very well your whole life. Is this different?

Baron: A lot of this is very different. Before, the Post was all about a very conventional and refined reporter. It used to be that everything we did had to be unique; if somebody already had it, there was no point in our doing it. We didn’t want to replicate what everyone else had done.

DL: And yet, you just won a Pulitzer. They do great original work all the time.

Baron: We do original work all the time. And I think we can do original work within the realm of these blogs, for example. It’s not so different in a lot of ways. If we had a science writer write about these people who walk on their hands, the problem is we wouldn’t get to it for a long time. We would have to wait for the science writer to be freed up and then decide if that’s a good use of our time given the other things we have to work on.

DL: You don’t have to do that anymore.

Baron: Right.

DL: One of the things that has come up over and over is that journalists need to be concerned about content engagement. Does your staff look at their metrics and their traffic?

Baron: We don’t give every reporter their metrics right now. We do give every department head and deputy access to the metrics of the site to see what’s doing well.

DL: Do they share that with the reporters?

Baron: If they want to, they can. We are at the start of it now, doing a midyear review of the performance on the Web and making clear to every department head and deputy that this is part of how we are going to measure people, how they are contributing to the Web. We don’t expect someone who is covering county schools to get the same traffic as the political bloggers. But are they posting? Are they looking for stories that might work on the Web? We just had a success on a story about a security guard at Target who got fired after he reported a shoplifter to the police. It turned out the shoplifter was a sheriff’s deputy. The deputy kept his job and there was no action against him, and the security guard got fired by Target for not following its procedure of talking to the company first. He said he followed the procedure he had always followed.

… What needs to be understood is the new medium requires a different way of communicating in the same way that television and radio and everything is different. There are many TV stations that put stuff on the Web, and it doesn’t work. Even TV video doesn’t work on the Web because we don’t need the anchors. We don’t need their introductions or the banter or any of that. We don’t need their good looks. None of that. It’s an intermediary, and no one wants it. Just show me the video. We don’t want to sit through that chitchat. Just show it to me. A lot of their video doesn’t work on the Web. Even video on the Web has to be different from TV or documentary video. We are only now beginning to figure out what that is. Clearly there is an outfit like Vice that has figured it out. Whether that is good journalism or not, people can debate. Clearly they recognize that a sense of immediacy, and the human involvement of a reporter who is not distancing himself from the experience, works for them.

DL: Is that something the Post can do?

Baron: Our view is we don’t have to be other people, but we do have to learn from other people. If we can see something there we can learn from and can do something in a way that is consistent with our brand and identity, then that is what we need to learn. We don’t intend to be BuzzFeed, but how can we learn something that can enhance our brand and adapt it to our newsroom instead of replicating it? That’s what we are looking for. We’ve hired from BuzzFeed, we’ve hired from Business Insider, Grantland, Politico, The Atlantic. We’ve hired from a lot of places. The most critical thing is a good, smart idea. I don’t care if it is digital or not. The guy running PostEverything was an editor at the National Journal. He didn’t have a digital background. He’s a smart editor, and you can’t beat smart. You can have the technical ability or understand lists, but if it’s a stupid list, it’s going to be bad. Some of our most successful stuff on the Web has been really serious stuff. We have a blog called WorldViews that explains what’s happening around the world in a very Webby way, and it’s very serious stuff. None of it is frivolous. It does really well.

… We just did a training session with people who have done well in traditional print who have been successful on the Web, which are some of our bloggers. We had a training session to help our staff make the transition from print to the Web. What did they have to learn about the Web to make them successful, and how does that compare to what they did in print? We had a packed house. These were people that people in the newsroom could identify with. It wasn’t digital people preaching to them. It was their colleagues with their same backgrounds and answering questions that they all have that nags at them. It was a packed house. One of our successful bloggers said that when she was doing print and she would have the main story, and then the box on the side, and she always liked the box better. Now she’s just doing the box, answering the question: What is the thing that you don’t get that we can explain to you?

DL: What does success look like over time? What’s the long-term strategy?

Baron: Honestly, I’ll be surprised if by 2025, we have a lot print newspapers. If you look at the numbers and demographics alone, young people are not going to print and older people are abandoning print as they learn how to do digital. They are learning it at a very rapid rate, and it becomes easier and easier. It’s not only just digital but it’s also mobile. Something like 50 percent of our traffic is now coming from mobile like smartphones or tablets. There are many young people that never use a desktop—ever. They watch television on their mobile devices.

I think by 2025, we are going to be in a totally digital world. Not that there won’t be any print, but it will be specialized in some way. There are some things that print does very well. It will answer a very specific need and it won’t be a mass medium. It will be a niche medium. It could be a fashion or music magazine. It will be particularly suited to the fact that producing something in print will be a considerable advantage, and it won’t be the only option available as a medium. I think that’s where the difference is. So I think there are things like that where it works extremely well, like home magazines—like Architectural Digest; it’s very hard to get a sense of that on a mobile device, so it works in print.

DL: But print isn’t different just because it creates an artifact. It’s about the fact that writing for the Web requires a different kind of narrative voice, a different kind of talent for recognizing what kind of story is going to draw readers.

Baron: We were talking to a candidate who was a fine reporter but had no sense of how to write for the Web. We looked at some samples, and they wouldn’t work on the Web. No personality, very flat, and no conversational tone. Can the person be ultimately taught? I guess—but you never know. In terms of traffic, I’m all in favor of people knowing what their stories are doing. I know there’s a fear we will only assign stories based on that, but we are not going to do that. First of all, we have a print edition we have to put out, and the readers are different. Their expectations are different and all of that. We recognize that some stories are part of building up an expertise and staying on a story. Like our investigative work.

We are going to do investigative. We think it’s important. It’s part of our mission, part of our identity and our brand, and people expect it of us. We invest a lot of money in it. I don’t expect investigative reporters, nor the long-form narrative writers that are part of our brand, to produce the same kind of traffic that someone covering a beat should produce. So the expectations are different, but it’s all part of what we do. But I think reporters should have the data about their traffic; I don’t believe there is a benefit in withholding information from people about how their own stories are doing.

DL: Let me ask you this: What are the implications or impact of nonprofit news organizations? They generate all of this content that is really significant work, and they give it to news organizations for free. It’s an interesting model.

Baron: I think it’s a small piece of the ecosystem, but I don’t think it will ever be a big factor. I think it will always be a small factor, because there is not enough philanthropy to support it at a level that would make it a big factor. I think we have to be successful as a business because if we are not, we are not in business.

I think a lot of the nonprofits do a lot of good work, but the rigors of business mean that we have to give people something every day, all day long. It’s not even just the newspaper, it’s something every minute. That’s what keeps people coming back and makes us essential in their lives. There’s nothing essential about some of these sites. It’s optional and great. It’s the cherry on top. Is it what people need every day to stay informed? It’s not; it’s a small slice in terms of subject matter.

DL: For an organization like yours that has a reputation and history of doing this great investigative work, does the fact it’s free to you make a difference?

Baron: Sure. I’ve had instances of people who try to charge us a lot of money. I said sorry, we aren’t going to pay it. We would not pay that for a premium piece, so take this somewhere else.

DL: One of [the Center for Public Integrity’s] reporters won the Pulitzer after working on the story every day for a year, all day every day. That’s an incredible investment.

Baron: That’s what nonprofit sites exist to do. But how can that actually satisfy information needs? It is a piece, a small piece, and in many instances, an important piece. But is it necessary for us? No. Are we happy to work with them on things? Absolutely. If they didn’t exist tomorrow, would we suffer any sense of loss? No. Do I think it would be a loss for the industry as a whole? Yes, but for us individually, it has nothing to do with sustaining us at all.

DL: So what is the business model?

Baron: They need to understand what those metrics are. What’s not in the metrics that people are asking to look at—like page views, time on site, time on story, levels of engagement—is dollars. What’s missing in all of that is dollar bills. That’s an area that people need to begin to understand. I’ve said before that I think people coming into journalism need to be entrepreneurs. They either need to be entrepreneurs within an organization, so-called intrepreneurs, and come up with good ideas, post things, take initiative, approve the concept, or they need to be entrepreneurs working for a small outfit, or they need to be entrepreneurs on their own. They need to be one of those. There is no future for people who think they are going to be merely cogs in the wheel, employees who aren’t coming forward with initiatives or proposing things we can do that will be successful.

I think we are becoming much more of a technology industry. I think people will need to have much more of an understanding of computer engineering than I do, for example. It does not mean, however, that they have to produce an app. There will be someone to produce an app if that’s the future. It’s sort of like saying that to be a successful bus driver you have to be the mechanic. You don’t need to be the mechanic. Or that to be a successful pilot you have to be able to build the plane. You don’t need to know how to build the plane. On the other hand, you want to have familiarity with the technology to know how it works. As the driver, you want to understand what the steering wheel does, and if something goes wrong you have some sense of what it might be. If you are a limo driver, you might want to know how to change the tire. Or put oil in your engine.

Knowing how to take advantage of the technology is much more important than actually building it. We have people who have a high degree of technical understanding, and they go to the engineers to help them build it. They can’t build everything. If they were to build it, it wouldn’t work too well. Long ago in this world economy, the concept of specialization and division of labor was established, and it hasn’t gone away.

You need to be fluent, knowledgeable and literate. You don’t need to be an engineer. I think you do need to be literate in the technology. When I was working with Knight, I proposed the idea of having computer engineers in the newsroom. We need more of them in our industry because we are becoming more technological. Not that every journalist needs to be a computer engineer, but we need more of them in the mix, understanding journalism. We need to be literate in their area, and we need them to be literate in ours, so we can bring the two together.

I do think it’s important for people in the business to be literate in the business. One of my big beefs with media pundits is they don’t understand the business. I mean the business, not the profession. Where do we make money? How is money made? People need to understand, what is our economic enterprise? We used to just do the journalism, and the business side will be taken care of. It went beyond ethical issues, it just didn’t matter. There was a disconnect. What we do journalistically had a market of its own. That was false security for us because we thought people were coming to us for certain reasons, but they were in fact coming because they didn’t have other choices. Now they have other options, and we are getting a better sense of the real world. That may lead to a situation in which journalists only do the things that make money, and then what happens to the stuff that doesn’t make money? I don’t know the answer to that, but I’m confident if there’s a demand for something, somehow, someone will find a model that will work. I don’t have to know the answer to that question to be confident that at some point an answer will emerge.

And while we don’t know the answer, there are all kinds of huge gaps in the kinds of stories we’re writing and coverage we’re providing. Huge gaps in the coverage of state government and huge gaps in the coverage of local government. Huge gaps in financing investigative reporting and holding people accountable. Huge gaps in coverage of Congress by news organizations around the country. Pretty soon, we won’t have anyone there covering senators and congressmen. I don’t think we’re all going to let that happen. At some point, I’m confident, there will develop a model that will provide the information people need, but it hasn’t happened yet.

DL: The model is going to have to involve people paying for journalism, for content.

Baron: The truth is, you can’t get everybody to collaborate to do it. You’re not going to get Huffington Post to charge on the Web. They will not charge on the Web. No one would pay for it. The point that I’ve made, just because they have high numbers of users, that’s the difference between free and pay. Would the people that use Huffington Post pay for it?

BuzzFeed has very large numbers. Would the people who go to BuzzFeed over and over be willing to pay for it? I’d say not. They are building a model, or trying to build a model, that doesn’t require people to pay.

DL: That’s a different enterprise.

Baron: The business model is unsettled. I don’t think anyone knows what the business model is yet. The business model right now is try a lot of different things to see what works. We have a very difficult economics right now in the industry. Right now, when you sell ad space on the Web, you are selling something that is essentially available in infinite quantities. Basic economics say that if you sell an item in scarce supply, the price will go up, and the scarcer the supply, the higher the price. If the supply is infinite, the price will go down. There are a certain number of page views worldwide, it’s a very large number, which is the advertising inventory. What’s our answer to the need to make more money? Generate more page views. As we generate more page views, the supply of available inventory goes up and rates go down. The results are you aren’t making any more money and may make less.

I liken this to being on a treadmill and you’re going, but you’re not going anywhere. Then someone speeds it up and you’re going faster, but you’re still not going anywhere. Then someone speeds it up more and more until you collapse because you can’t sustain it anymore. In many ways, we are on that treadmill, and no one knows how to get off. If you were to step off the treadmill, you would collapse and hit your head against the next treadmill and you’d be done. So how do you get off in a safe way and not know that in fact what you are going to do is tumble down because you can’t sustain yourself. We don’t know about that.