New Top Editor at Washington Post: Marcus Brauchli to Be Replaced by Marty Baron

David L. Ryan/The Boston Globe Marty Baron, the new editor of The Washington Post.

The Washington Post, facing steep financial challenges and striving to find profitability as readers abandon print papers for digital formats, changed its newsroom leadership Tuesday.

The Post announced that Marcus Brauchli, its executive editor for the past four years, will be stepping aside, but remaining with the company. Marty Baron, the 58-year-old editor of The Boston Globe, will replace Mr. Brauchli, and will take over, effective Jan. 2.

Mr. Brauchli joined The Post in 2008 after leaving The Wall Street Journal several months after it was taken over by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation. Under Mr. Brauchli's stewardship, The Post won four Pulitzer Prizes.

The change in leadership comes at a time when The Washington Post, like many newspapers, has been struggling on many fronts. As Post readers have shifted their reading from print to online, the company has suffered from declining advertising revenue and steady circulation drops in recent years.

Revenue at its newspaper-publishing division revenue dropped by 4 percent, to $137.3 million, in the third quarter, largely because of a decline in advertising. According to the Audit Bureau of Circulations, The Post's circulation from Monday through Friday declined to 507,615 in March, compared with 698,116 in 2007. The company has already started laying off staff in departments like advertising and the technology team to stem losses.

The paper also faces fresh competition from online news outlets like Politico, which was co-founded by former Washington Post reporters. The Post Compan y's news division also can no longer depend on Kaplan, its college and test preparation business, to help supplement its losses.

But the company's larger, industry-wide, problems have been made worse by internal tension between Katharine Weymouth, the paper's publisher and granddaughter of Katharine Graham, and Mr. Brauchli, whom she hired in May of 2008. Mr. Brauchli was quickly criticized by members of the newsroom, who described him as more distant than his predecessors like Leonard Downie and Benjamin Bradlee.

Katherine Frey/The Washington Post Marcus Brauchli, the outgoing editor of The Post, will remain with t he company.

Ms. Weymouth and Mr. Brauchli's relationship chilled as she pushed him to make newsroom cuts that Mr. Brauchli was uncomfortable with, according to people in the newsroom familiar with the discussions.

Ms. Weymouth told journalists at public events this past summer that she wanted to remove Mr. Brauchli, people familiar with those discussions said. But her uncle, Donald Graham, the company's chairman, stepped in and advised her to try to work things out, these people said. Mr. Graham in an interview last month praised Mr. Brauchli.

Discussions between Ms. Weymouth and Mr. Brauchli broke down again in recent weeks when Mr. Brauchli brought to her a newsroom budget that incorporated the cuts she asked for; despite that, she rejected it, according to a person in the newsroom familiar with the discussions. And while Mr. Brauchli was in the newsroom on election night, he also agreed to bring in Len Downie, the former executive editor, to ove rsee the election coverage, as Mr. Downie had done in 2008.

Mr. Downie denied that he had been asked to serve as interim editor and said his responsibilities only involved the election night coverage. “Nobody has asked me to do anything else,” he said.

Mr. Baron has overseen The Globe since 2001, and during this tenure the paper won six Pulitzer Prizes. Mr. Baron previously was executive editor of The Miami Herald and worked as a senior editor at The New York Times. Earlier in his career, he also worked for The Los Angeles Times.

While the news of Mr. Brauchli's imminent departure has generated much chatter within the newspaper industry, it has apparently meant little to the readers who still faithfully turn to The Post to get information and analysis.

Sean Gibbons, vice president of communications for the centrist research organization Third Way, and a former CNN producer, said that while he received most of his election night coverage via Twitte r, he made sure to read The Washington Post the day after for the insights of some of its reporters and columnists.

“The Post still holds the advantage of being the sort of grande dame of Washington,” said Mr. Gibbons. “It's been there. It's still an institution.”