GAZETTE:  You graduated from Lehigh University with a joint B.A./M.B.A. degree. Were you genuinely interested in business, or was that more of a fallback, perhaps to satisfy your parents?

BARON:  Partially it was. I’m pretty confident they had in mind something else for me. My mother repeatedly would ask me, even after I got into the profession, whether I didn’t want to think about going to law school because so many of my friends had gone to law school. I told her that I was very interested in the law, but that I just wasn’t interested in spending full time on that. I like the immediate, relatively short-term gratification of producing a story, editing a story, seeing the results on a fairly short timeframe. But my parents were fine with it. When I got out of college, I wasn’t absolutely sure that I was going to go into journalism. I thought I might want to go into journalism, but I also thought that if I decided to go into business, it would be helpful to have the M.B.A. I knew enough about journalism at the time, oddly enough, that it was becoming more specialized, so I thought it would be really useful if I had an expertise in business. If I had not gone into journalism? I might have gone to law school, I might have gone into business. I never really did think about anything else.

GAZETTE:  After college, you started at the Miami Herald. What did they have you do?

BARON:  They assigned me to a two-person bureau in a little town called Stuart, Fla. At the time, there were 12,000 people in the entire town and 50,000 people in the entire county. It stretched from the coast to essentially Lake Okeechobee, but most of the people were on the coast, and toward the lake were a lot of migrant workers. There weren’t a lot of gigantic stories there. We had to fill a page every day, six days a week, and take our own photographs, so it was a grind. Somebody who was applying for a job there called me as he was trying to make a decision whether to come. And he asked me what I did in my spare time, and I told him I did my laundry. [Laughs.] He did not take the job. After that, they didn’t allow anybody else to call me. It was a start. That’s all I was looking for. I was looking for a paying job, and I got one for $200 a week. And that was it.

GAZETTE:  Every paper you’ve led has won numerous awards, including Pulitzer Prizes. What’s the key to consistently delivering award-winning journalism?

BARON:  I think that we always have to be asking: What is the truth here? What don’t we know? And not just what we as a news organization should know, but what should the public know? And when there are doubts about what the truth is, then we are determined to find out and persist in those efforts. And so that’s what we try to do. That’s what we did in Boston. The issue there was: Did the Cardinal [Bernard Law] himself know about the abuse by one particular priest and yet reassign him from parish to parish to parish? Was this emblematic of a pattern of cover-up of clergy who engaged in sexual abuse? And so we set about trying to answer that question. In Miami, in the year 2000, amid the presidential election, it was uncertain who had won the state of Florida. Was it Al Gore or was it George W. Bush? And while the Florida Supreme Court had ordered a recount, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered that there would be no recount. So we set about trying to find out who really prevailed in that election. Fortunately, under the Florida public records law, we were entitled to look at every single ballot. So we went to every one of the 67 counties in Florida and looked at every ballot that was cast, accompanied by a major accounting firm, which did its own count.

GAZETTE:  In 2017, The Post adopted the tagline “Democracy dies in darkness.” Three years later, as many departments and functions of the federal government have become politicized, does democracy still die in darkness or is it expiring right out in the open, in the bright light of day?

BARON:  Well, it’s good question. We’re not prepared yet to change the motto, by the way. [Laughs.] What that motto is really getting at is that it’s our job to reveal what is happening within government in particular and within powerful institutions, and that if we’re not doing that, then democracy is not likely to thrive. Our job is to bring transparency, to bring light to government and to the influence that powerful institutions and powerful individuals have on our lives. It’s true. I do think that there is an assault on our democratic institutions and on democratic norms. That’s deeply concerning. A lot of what might have occurred behind the scenes in the past is now occurring right out in the open. But there’s still a lot happening behind the scenes. And so our job is to cover, and cover well, both what’s happening behind the scenes and what the implications are of what’s happening openly.

GAZETTE:  Has the industry done a good enough job defending itself against attacks, explaining what journalism is and what it’s not, or promoting how society benefits from journalism? Do you think letting the work speak for itself is a mistake in hindsight, given where we are right now?

BARON:  I think we’ve done a terrible job as an industry in explaining ourselves. In the past, we have felt like, “Oh, the work will speak for itself.” But while the work should speak for itself, it doesn’t. And so I think that over many years, the public has come to take the work of journalism for granted. They’ve come to think that a democracy can exist without a vigorous, free, and independent press. And the reality is that it cannot. We’ve done a really bad job of explaining the importance of free and independent press to our democracy, to our system of governance generally, to our communities. What happens when you don’t have a press? We can see that now in much of the country where newspapers which historically have been the preeminent provider of news about communities, many of those newspapers are now dying and disappearing or they’re being stripped down so much that they hardly have any journalistic resources available to do true journalism and things go uncovered. Politicians know that they’re not being covered. They know that they can get away with things that they wouldn’t have previously. When the public is uninformed, it is susceptible to manipulation. And I think that the press has done a really bad job of explaining why it’s necessary and what its contribution is to our country and to our communities.

GAZETTE:  People say you’re a terrific spokesman for the profession. How do you feel about that mantle?

BARON:  It’s not something I ever expected for myself, certainly not something that I sought. It just kind of happened. Somewhat previously when I was in Boston, because of the church investigation, but particularly now in the current environment, I think it’s important that somebody stand up and speak to the principles of our profession and to the practices of our profession, and help explain who we are and what we’re trying to accomplish. And there aren’t that many of us around to do it, so I’ve been, I guess, involuntarily enlisted in that. I don’t shy from it. I didn’t seek it. But I think it’s incredibly important, and it’s one of the most important things that I can do. I hope it has some impact.

GAZETTE:  Have you given any thought to retirement? When will you know that you’re ready to move on?

BARON:  I think I will always be involved in journalism in one way or another. The question is whether I’m running a large newsroom and how long I want to do that. I don’t plan to withdraw and become a hermit. I’ll still be engaged in one way or another — at least I hope to be. But I have to think about it. I haven’t made any decisions. I’m 65. I’ve been doing this for a long time. I’ve been in the business for 44 years, and I’ve been a top editor for 20. These are exhausting jobs. There are a lot of pressures, and they don’t give you a lot of opportunity to just kick back and relax. And that’s something that I need to think about.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.