Marcus Brauchli: Underneath the new Post editor's exterior beats a spirit stamped 'Made in Boulder'

Boulder native Marcus Brauchli, who stepped down as the top editor at the Wall Street Journal with the takeover of that publication by Rupert Murdoch three months ago, was named top editor of the Washington Post yesterday. And in taking over one of the nation’s most influential newspapers, Brauchli wasted little time giving a hint of his roots.

In a story published today in his own new journal, he says "My mantra has been, we are not defined by medium, we are defined by our approach to journalism.” Catch that use of "mantra"?

In speaking that way, the 47-year-old button-down leader gave a hint how his upbringing may have formed him. Boulder in the 1960s and 1970s was a more freewheeling community than today, a place which attracted the likes of Beat Poet Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs. Did he, like some of my friends from that era, partake in such activities as the Boulder Shakespeare Festival, or hang around the 16th Street Mall, where folks such as “Evan from Heaven” did tightrope tricks with other buskers?

Actually, according to his dad, Christopher R. Brauchli, his son was "a typical Boulder kid, who got good grades" and was interested in journalism from a young age. Mountain climbing and skiing were his sports, not organized teams at Boulder Jr. High School and Boulder High.

At Columbia University, he was a stringer for the New York Times -- and his father says, "I don't think he spent much time in school. He was always hanging around the newspaper office."  Add a Harvard pedigree, but maybe not surprisingly, he started as a copy translator in Asia in 1984. Done like a true Boulderite.

The elder Brauchli jokingly says he is "a father who followed in his son's footsteps" and is a frequent contributor to newspapers, law journal newsletters and online sites. Marc Brauchli's wife, Maggie Farley, is a Denver-native who covers the UN for the Los Angeles Times.

It’s clear that Brauchli was tapped in a generational shift to see how he can help the beacon paper, which like others is struggling with circulation losses. Even though the Post has had a tradition of "promoting from within," Post Publisher Katherine Weymouth, only 42, is quoted saying, "I thought that we could benefit from someone who would come in and look at what we do with fresh eyes."

Whether this now technically makes him the boss of such journalistic heavyweights as "All the President's Men" icon Bob Woodward is unclear, at least for now, to his dad.

What is clear is that regardless of his history at the staid WSJ, beating inside any conservative outward appearance in a spirit stamped “Made in Boulder”.