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Boston Globe Editor Marty Baron to lead ASNE chat

Date: Tuesday, Sept. 13, 2011 at noon ET/ 9 PT

Hosts: Melanie Sill, USC Annenberg, and Carole Tarrant, The Roanoke (Va.) Times

Guest: Martin “Marty” Baron, editor, The Boston Globe

Martin “Marty” Baron became editor of The Boston Globe on July 30, 2001, after holding top editing positions at The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and The Miami Herald. He started tweeting recently as GlobeMartyBaron.

Under Baron's leadership, The Globe has won five Pulitzer prizes, including the Pulitzer Gold Medal for Public Service in 2003 for an investigation into clergy sex abuse in the Catholic Church. The Globe also has won local Emmys and been a national finalist for its video work.

Along with those traditional journalism successes, Baron's Globe has gained recognition for online excellence and tech innovation. The Globe hosted a three-day “Boston Hack Day Challenge” in February and put some of the resulting projects up at beta.boston.com, its “test kitchen” for new Web features and ideas. Baron says the company also has offered free office space to start-up companies and announced the first taker the other day. The Globe is one of five newsrooms worldwide that will host a winner from the Knight-Mozilla “Mojo” challenge for news innovation for a year in 2012.

The Globe has been working for a year toward the launch of a new two-brand digital strategy. The popular and successful Boston.com, which Baron says is the seventh- or eight-largest newspaper site with 6 million unique visitors a month, will remain a free site. Baron says the company will launch a new companion, BostonGlobe.com, “a subscription site that will contain the bulk of the journalism in the Boston Globe newspaper but also be a dynamic website.”

Subscribers to the Globe newspaper, he says, will have access to BostonGlobe.com as part of their subscription at no additional charge. The cost of a digital-only subscription has yet to be determined. Here's a Globe story from last year describing the plans.

This year the Globe has maintained an active investigative and enterprise effort, including a major multimedia series on the public school assignment process and investigations of the MBTA's poor performance, continuing problems with the Big Dig and of the mayor of Lawrence, Mass., who's now under federal grand jury investigation.

More information available here.

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