If Rupert Murdoch wants to charge for content online, he will succeed in so far, but no further than what he provides that is unique and can't be found anywhere. It doesn't seem to me that if he wants to charge it will be a blow to universal freedom and liberty of mankind.

If I want to spend the rest of my life reading one day's output of information, which is about what it would take, OK fine. But I personally prefer calibration from an aggregator or newspaper, where the No. 1 story is one they consider important, [and] they're usually right.

My wife [Tina Brown] co-founded the Daily Beast, so I have no hostility to the web or Internet. A number of print friends of mine regard it as the worst thing that's ever happened, but I don't.

For 50 years my father worked for the railroad.

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.

Transmitting information is easier than creating understanding.

I had been at the newspaper for a few months. It wasn’t regarded as the paper, it was their paper. There was a sense of community because they reported, we reported, I reported the little things, the whist drives, the weddings, the funerals, the little speeches. In one sense it was the most boring copy in the world to anyone picking it up, but, on the other hand, it was crucial to the people who lived in those communities.