This new economy that's just emerged has a new central economic actor. It's not the worker, the person who produces, nor the person who consumes, the purchaser. It's a new actor that does both things at the same time, call them a creator. They both create and consume in the same single act, and we're just beginning to see the shape of this new economy and it changes not just the economy itself, it's going to change the whole nature of the work relationship.

The thing I see happening is that there's a real compression between generations. There used to be about 20 years difference (in technology use). Now you talk to 15-year-old kids and their 9-year-old brother or sister is using stuff that they don't understand.

Using technology merely to lower operational costs amounts to standing on a whale fishing for minnows. It just allows you to do the old thing more efficiently, where in this moment of deep transformation, it is much more likely that you should be doing something entirely new in an entirely different way.

The difference between our collective generation and your generation (differentiating the reporters from the students) is that we poured our souls out on paper that got easily yellowed and lost. The danger is that many of your friends (nodding at the students) are putting intimate ideas in cyberspace journals. So when today's 15-year-old is 40, some friend is going to drag out all of that idiotic stuff at their class reunion.

I would say digital technology probably doesn't have much impact on us so far. We've seen photographs of people from when they are alive. We see home movies. We have videotapes now and e-mails. When it's going to get interesting is in massively multiplayer online games where you have avatars (online personas). You could actually create an avatar that's semi-autonomous. It could do things for you while you get off the game to run the rest of your life.

I can't imagine how you can find the discipline to be emotionally detached reporting on a revolution, the winds of which are blowing right down the hallways of the publication you work for. That's like an orthopedic surgeon trying to perform arthroscopic surgery on their own knee. It's possible, but it's hard to see through all the pain.

The best way to let people go is to let them know when they're hired that it's an uncertain environment and that their job is always at risk and even if you let them go, it's not that you don't love them.