For 50 years my father worked for the railroad.

What I'm driving at is let's not lose sight in our excitement of the democratization of the media that some things are bad, false and ugly - and no amount of electronic gloss will make them true, beautiful and accurate.

The credibility of a newspaper or news magazine is essential so you can check it for accuracy. I'm not saying it's not valuable. One can make a case for just running everything. Just run it! That's one of the advantages of the web, you can run everything - but you don't help the reader find out what's important.

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.

Throughout America's young history there has been a necessary tension between the individual and the group.

Television and radio are what I call sequential media; they're not simultaneous media. With simultaneous media, you can scan your eye down an electronic or print page and pick among six or seven stories you might like and want to read. With television and radio, you have to wait until the guy's finished talking about the balloon boy, which I don't have the slightest interest in, to find out that all hell's broken loose in Baghdad. Because they've chosen that day to start with the balloon boy.

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.