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.

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.

I think America has a brilliant future.

The democratization of news is fine and splendid, but it's not reporting. It's based on a fragment of information picked up from television or the web, and people are sounding off about something that's not necessarily true.

I wrote about Bosnia at the time. Somebody looked out their window and saw gangsters coming down the street and doing ethnic cleansing. I said that was the thing that would happen in the future, someone phoning in what they were seeing on the scene. Whether it's the Huffington Post, the Daily Beast, Drudge Report or the BBC, all those reports, you have to assume there's a real person [who] has credibility.

I love craftsmanship of any kind, a job well done either by my chiropractor or carpenter, and I am addicted to print, the type, the ink. But my basic passion is journalism and I can't live without being online.

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.