Suzanne Kreiter Brian McGrory, a Boston native, has been at the newspaper for the last 23 years.
8:44 p.m. | Updated
The Boston Globe announced on Thursday that Brian McGrory, a columnist and former metro editor at the newspaper and a Boston native with deep roots in the area, would be its next editor. The appointment is effective immediately.
Mr. McGrory, who has worked at The Globe for the last 23 years, will succeed Martin Baron, the newspaper’s editor for the last decade. Mr. Baron has been named the editor of The Washington Post and officially left The Globe last week.
Christopher M. Mayer, The Globe’s publisher, said he chose Mr. McGrory from a pool of internal and external candidates because of his ties to Boston and his ability to motivate the newsroom. “He’s a terrific mentor and leader in terms of inspiring great journalism,” Mr. Mayer said. “It’s that ability to inspire the talent and attracting and retaining the talent.”
Mr. McGrory said that he planned to build on “the accountability journalism the paper has been known for” and did not intend to make significant changes.
“After Marty Baron’s extremely successful tenure here, we don’t need any overhaul,” he said.
Mr. McGrory, 51, grew up in Weymouth, Mass., and had his start at The Globe as a paperboy. In a video posted on The Globe’s Web site, he recounted how he started his own newspaper for his fifth-grade social studies class. “It’s the only thing I ever wanted to do and, oddly enough, the only place I ever wanted to do it was The Boston Globe,” he said.
After attending Bates College, and working at The New Haven Register and The Patriot Ledger in Quincy, Mass., he joined The Globe in 1989. His career there has included reporting for the metro desk and working as a roving national reporter and as a White House correspondent. He is a second cousin of the longtime Washington columnist Mary McGrory, who died in 2004.
He became a metro columnist in 1998 and later the section’s editor.
A statement released by The Globe highlighted his work leading the metro desk on investigating corruption on Beacon Hill and enhancing the section’s narrative journalism. In the last couple of years, he wrote a twice-weekly column.
He recently published his first nonfiction book, “Buddy: How a Rooster Made Me a Family Man,” about raising a pet rooster as he adjusted to suburban life with his fiancée and her children from her first marriage.
The announcement was somewhat of a surprise in a search closely watched by local journalists. The Boston Phoenix reported the leading finalists for the job were Caleb Solomon, the paper’s managing editor, and David Shribman, a former Washington bureau chief for The Globe and currently the executive editor of The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
Mr. McGrory is stepping into a drastically changing job at the newspaper, which is owned by The New York Times Company. The newsroom is staffed with 370 people, a decrease of roughly 40 percent over the last decade.
The paper’s circulation has shrunk by nearly half during that time, to 230,351 on weekdays, from 438,621 readers in 2002. The Globe is also battling a struggling advertising market. According to The New York Times Company’s third-quarter earnings report, the New England Media Group, which includes The Globe, had a 6 percent decline in advertising revenue.
Mr. Mayer stressed that he recognized that Mr. McGrory did not have a strong digital background at a time when the newspaper was becoming more dependent on readers who received access to content digitally. As of Thursday, Mr. McGrory had only about 1,000 followers on Twitter.
Mr. McGrory said that while he was just getting into social media, “I’ve been pretty fascinated by it in the short time I’ve been doing it.”
He said he read The Globe on an iPhone and iPad each day.
“I don’t remember the last time I read the paper by flipping the pages,” Mr. McGrory said. “I’m not a digital guy. But I’m not a printing press guy either.”
This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: December 20, 2012
Due to an editing error, an earlier version of this post misstated the size of The Globe’s newsroom. After shrinking over the decade, the newsroom’s staff is currently 370 people; it didn’t shrink from 370 people.
A version of this article appeared in print on 12/21/2012, on page B2 of the NewYork edition with the headline: Columnist at Boston Globe to Become Its Next Editor.
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