I often see cases of Internet news where there's no reconciliation for what's gone before and what's newly arrived. That training for me - which was absolutely brutal and I was terrified - was so important, especially later in life when one was faced with conflicting stories and conflicting evidence.

This impressed me when I was the editor of the Sunday Times [of London] - we had the "Bloody Sunday" killings of 13 unarmed civilians by British paratroopers. We interviewed 500 people for our report, and not one of them could give us a total picture of what was happening. It was like the Rashomon effect multiplied a million times. For a website or even a newspaper to be a collector of information flow is not the highest form of journalism.

When I first came to the United States in 1956 I fell in love with things - mainly the vitality and the freedoms.

When came the invasion of privacy.That kind of thing turns the newspaper from a friendly organ - not necessarily appeasing everybody - into the enemy. It's one reason why newspapers have suffered circulation falls.

In journalism it is simpler to sound off than it is to find out. It is more elegant to pontificate than it is to sweat.

I think a lot of newspapers have lost touch with that sense of community, which so impressed me as a teenager when I had to knock on people's doors.

I think there's a lot of benefit in letting people vent. When I was on the Manchester Evening News, we got 500 letters a day, and part of my job as editor was to edit them. And I thought that was one of the best things in the newspaper, and it was instituted by an editor known as Big Tom, who said 'this is the voice of the people.' And he was quite right.