It used to be, if you were a reporter, you wrote a story and then you moved on to the next one. We were used to people coming to the New York Times. We waited for them to turn on our website or to pick up our print paper and see what we have. We now understand that we have to make our stories available to our readers. A lot of people get their news from Facebook or Twitter and we want to make sure that they see some of our best stories there, too. We do this more aggressively now than we did before.

My job is to cover the hell out of the story, very aggressively. The real place to be courageous if you're a news organization is where you put your people to cover the story. It's making sure that you have people going to Baghdad. It's making sure that you figure out how to cover the war in Afghanistan. While the journalist in me completely stands with them, the editor of the New York Times in me thinks my job is to figure out what the hell happened and cover the hell out of it, and that's more important than some symbolic drawing on the front page.

You're always going to have more traffic if you're a free website. But we've always admitted that the New York Times was behind other news organizations in making our stories available to people on the web. BuzzFeed and the Huffington Post are much better than we are at that, and I envy them for this. But I think the trick for the New York Times is to stick to what we are. That doesn't mean: Don't change. But I don't want to be BuzzFeed. If we tried to be what they are, we would lose.

I always thought that digital first was a simplistic notion, and I am not even sure quite what it means. It should be stories first. Let's take the Paris story: the New York Times covered it all day, we held nothing back. Everything we learned, we published online. Then, when you approach your print deadline, you have to do two things. You have to polish those stories that are online because print is less forgiving of mistakes. Secondly, in an ideal world, you pick one thing that will feel fresh and compelling to people in the morning when they pick up the print paper.

The fact that Edward Snowden didn't approach the New York Times hurt a lot. It meant two things. Morally, it meant that somebody with a big story to tell didn't think we were the place to go, and that's painful. And then it also meant that we got beaten on what was arguably the biggest national security story in many, many years. Not only beaten by the Guardian, because he went to the Guardian, but beaten by the Post, because he went to a writer from the Post. We tried to catch up and did some really good stories that I feel good about. But it was really, really, really painful.

I grew up in the traditional American newspaper world with a morning paper and an afternoon paper competing with each other beat by beat by beat. It was the most fun I've ever had. And it was great for journalism.

We, in the New York Times, have not yet figured out how to grow our international readership. We started a website in China, which the Chinese government has blocked, but it has a pretty healthy readership. The Guardian, for instance, has gotten tremendous growth through its website in the US. We have to figure out how to go after readership in different parts of the world.