We are spending so much time in studios, and in chairs listening to somebody at a lectern, and if we really understood what Americans were concerned about and what resentments were building, we would not have been as shocked by Donald Trump's success.

Are you telling me that the polite little note I sent my college alumni magazine has, by some unbeknownst series of errors, come to be printed in The Paper of Record, instead? What a fiasco!

I think the Donald Trump's obsession is, is bigger than just polling. I mean it's funny because we've been harping on polls like never before, Trump was harping on his own polls endlessly. I mean his stump speeches would begin with him crowing about his latest poll numbers and that was just a kind of odd convergence.

Writers and reporters need to remind themselves they're not to be judged solely by the number of clicks or eyeballs on a given story, but there is this other value and this other important mission, and the key is balancing the two so that you stay alive long enough, whether you're an individual writer or whether you're a whole news organization, to keep doing what you're doing but that you don't get so driven by that that you forget that what you're supposed to be doing in a higher sense is informing people, is elevating the debate and not lowering it.

Even if you're trying to remain objective, even if you're trying not to mount any campaigns or endorse anything, when you cover an issue you are at least encouraging people to think about all the possibilities and if you're not covering political reform, electoral reform, you can write stories about them that don't say we must do this but just educate people on the fact that there are various advocates who are tugging us in that direction, that can present the arguments of those advocates, and I do think that's an issue we for some reason completely turned away from.

I think with Donald Trump we're seeing the sort of utterly vanished line at long last of enter - between entertainment and politics. I mean there's always been an enormous dose of entertainment in politics. Trump has completely erased that line but the Trump phenomenon when it comes to where the media's culpability is how much we should be beating ourselves up, that's a complicated question because one of the distinctive features of our era is we know exactly what consumers are doing almost in real time.

Another way in which our system is unfair. Why do Iowans get so much of a bigger voice every four years than everybody else? Ditto for New Hampshire. There are proposals and it could well happen that we could have a rotating calendar where different years different states went first. I would endorse that.