Baron was born in Tampa, Florida, to Jewish emigrants from Israel. He attended Berkeley Preparatory School and worked on the school's student paper. He matriculated at Lehigh University where he was editor of The Brown and White student newspaper. He earned both a Bachelor of Arts in Journalism and MBA with honors in four years, graduating in 1976. He had received special permission to take graduate classes as an undergraduate. Baron is a fluent Spanish speaker. The year he graduated from college Baron began working for The Miami Herald; he moved to The Los Angeles Times in 1979, and to The New York Times in 1996.He returned to the Herald as executive editor in 2000 and led coverage of numerous key stories, including Elián González's return to Cuba and the 2000 election. In July 2001 Baron succeeded Matthew V. Storin as executive editor of The Boston Globe. Baron's editorial term at the Globe shifted the paper's coverage from international events towards locally centered investigative journalism. The Globe's coverage of the Boston Catholic sexual abuse scandal earned it a Pulitzer Prize.In January 2013, Baron took over as executive editor of The Washington Post, succeeding Marcus Brauchli In 2014, The Post won two Pulitzer Prizes, one in the category of public service for revelations of secret surveillance by the National Security Agency and the other for explanatory journalism about food stamps in America. The next year, it won the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting for its coverage of security lapses in the Secret Service; and in 2016, it won the Pulitzer Prize in the category of national reporting for a ground-breaking project that chronicled every killing by a police officer in 2015. Baron was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2012.  

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