Marty Baron on how people read The Washington Post (C-SPAN)

C-SPAN: You had -- it seems to me you have your foot in the old camp, the old journalism and the new camp. And I want to read this to ask you what the old-timers would think of your quote. "Analytics dashboards will soon be added to reporters computers and traffic figures will eventually be looked at as a part of performance reviews." Anybody swallow hard that you know in our business when they read that?

BARON: They probably did swallow hard and maybe I swallowed hard when I said it. But, that is just a reality. And I think it is an important reality and the reason is that we need to know how people are reading our information. We need to know how many people are reading us. We need to know how they are coming to us.

So for example, if they are not coming directly to our website and they are coming to us through Facebook or through Google or through Twitter or through Snapchat or through Reddit or through. any of these other venues, we should know.

And I don't think there's anything terribly radical about it, no matter how that sounds. The reality is that when those of us in the newspaper industry, and I have been in it now for 40 years, those of us who have been in this industry for a long time, when we learned journalism, we were taught journalism that said, how does this work when people read newspapers?

We were taught essentially how did people read newspapers. Well now, yes, they continue to read newspapers, but more people are reading on, on digital devices. And so we need to understand how are they reading on digital devices. And it is comparable to what we learned in terms of how do they read newspapers. We need to know how they are reading us.

Watch the complete Q&A with Marty Baron on Sunday, January 10 at 8pm ET on CSPAN.