Brauchli (via Miller Center)Marcus Brauchli will leave his position as executive editor of The Washington Post next January 2, the newspaper announced today. Brauchli, who took the Post’s top job in 2008 after leaving The Wall Street Journal, will be succeeded by Boston Globe editor Martin Baron.
Brauchli came to the Post after being ushered out of the Journal following Rupert Murdoch’s 2007 purchase of the business-oriented daily. He was the first executive editor in many years not rise through the ranks as a lifetime Postie, as his predecessors Leonard Downie Jr. and Benjamin Bradlee did.
Under Brauchli, the Post finally merged its print and online newsrooms; for several years, the Post’s Web operation was run out of a satellite office in Arlington. And though some might say differently of the current WashingtonPost.com’s user experience, publisher Katharine Weymouth praised Brauchli’s technological sensibilities in a statement:
“Under his leadership, we have become one newsroom publishing on multiple platforms, traffic has grown substantially and we are consistently recognized as among the most innovative mainstream news sites.”
Brauchli’s stepping down and replacement by Baron had been rumored for a while. The Huffington Post’s Michael Calderone reported last week that Baron, who has run the Globe since 2001, was the front-runner to succeed Brauchli.
Since Brauchli took the reins, the Post has won four Pulitzer Prizes, most recently in 2011 for photography. He will be staying with The Washington Post Company, however, becoming its vice president in charge of new media properties, the Post reports.
Before coming to the Globe, Baron ran The Miami Herald, which won a Pulitzer in 2001 for its coverage of the immigration controversy over seven-year-old Cuban émigre Elían González. In 2003, the Globe won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for its exposés of sexual abuses by Roman Catholic priests.
“I am enormously proud of what we have accomplished here, and honored to have worked among so many brilliant journalists,” Brauchli said in a statement.
