The mainstream press was not aggressive enough after 9/11, was not aggressive enough in asking questions about a decision to go to war in Iraq, was not aggresive enough in asking the hard questions about the War on Terror. I accept that for the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times.

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.

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.

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.

I know this is going to get me in trouble, but I'll say it: The whole notion that I am supposed to constantly tweet is ridiculous. There are a lot of journalists at the New York Times who tweet. I am not opposed to it. But I don't have enough time. And editors don't have much to say. My world consists of this office, this floor, my apartment and wonderful conversations with our reporters and correspondents - all of them know a lot more about the world than I do.

I also don't think all of the revenue will come from digital subscriptions. We have in the New York Times a mix of revenue sources and it will continue to be a mix for quite a while. What makes me more nervous is that we built this newsroom on a really high profit margin that has eroded significantly over the last years. I'm nervous that we won't continue to have the profit margins that allow us to have a big, robust newsroom.

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.