[5] Baker began his professional career at the Black River Tribune, a weekly newspaper in Ludlow, Vermont.

After working in Venezuela and Ecuador, he spent a year at the El Paso (Texas) Herald-Post.

In 1992 he received the Overseas Press Club Morton Frank Award, given for best business reporting from abroad in magazines, for his portrait of the rising Mexican auto industry.

It described how people would be understood and predicted as workers, shoppers, voters, patients, and potential terrorists.

[13] In early 2011, Houghton Mifflin published Baker's Final Jeopardy: Man vs. Machine and the Quest to Know Everything,[14] which follows IBM's development of Watson, an artificial intelligence computer system designed to play against humans in the television game show Jeopardy!.