Why did you decide to do write a column now?

I really wanted just to be able to use my own voice after editing magazines for the last 20 years, I've always been in the business of suggesting cultural coverage to other writers, bringing a point of view to their role in a magazine. But to be actually able to do a column--where I can just bring my point of view as a voice --is very liberating for me. The Times is a great vehicle, really, because it has a big audience. But it's also a smart audience. And it's very hard to get both those things. And you know, they also appreciate a voice at The Times. They allow columnists to be themselves.

Will your column be a fairly free-flowing ride?

It's fairly free-flowing. I will just simply write as it moves me. I may be writing about a book or a movie or a person, places where I've been or something I've done. Or politics. It's going to what's on my mind at the moment.

But even as an editor you kept your hand in writing, didn't you?

I did. I was doing the diary thing in "Talk," which, you know, I enjoyed doing enormously--that was for me a great transition into getting my own writing voice back. I honestly just wanted to have fun for myself--I felt I had a lot to say, and I realized that I missed having a magazine as a place to express my ideas--about the culture and the the power game and about all the things that were my beat beat, as a magazine editor. The Times column is a place for me to unload those perceptions.

Having been an editor for as long as you have, what kind of special discipline do you now bring to your own writing?

I think I've got much higher standards than I had. Before I was an editor, I always was something of an agonizer as a writer. Like a lot of writers, I write and rewrite-- I don't find it easy. But at the same time, I feel more aware of what isn't going to work. I feel more aware of pitfalls to try to avoid. I feel also more aware about who I'm writing about and how it might go across. I think you're much more aware of all of those things when you've been an editor.

You used the word "fun" earlier. One gets a feeling, however, that the element of fun seems to be missing in a lot of high-powered journalism.

What would you say are some of the essential ingredients of getting "fun" back in the business?

I think the trouble is that fun has often been confused with a sort of irresponsibility or a sort of trashiness. I'm trying in the column to be entertaining without being mean. Sometimes, obviously, I can be very sharp. And I think about that before I take aim. Of course I have been sharp on a few occasions in the column. I think that it's important to make something as entertaining as you can while having integrity. There's a strange snobbery about that, it seems, in the serious publications here. It's almost as if, in America, the mixture of high and low has still not really been integrated in quite the same way that it has in Europe. The London Times can have material in it that the New York Times would not have--and nobody feels threatened by that.

How would you place your position as far as social and environmental issues go?

I'm not somebody who takes formal positions about issues. The positions that I take tend to be driven by how I'm responding to what I'm seeing and hearing. I'm not someone who says, "But I am this. Therefore, everything I say will fit in this niche or this particular portmanteau of opinions." I think that as an editor I was fairly free of political bias. I simply regarded a story as interesting intrinsically or not as opposed to: did it serve some kind of an agenda? But I do get aggravated by what I see as the lack of intelligent dissent in the American media at the moment.

How so?

It seems that we have two kinds of media really. One is just simply the kind of "on the one hand, on the other," strenuously masquerading as impartial while actually leaving out a whole lot of things might make the piece fairer. Or else, it's yelling, yellow writing or TV television, where a discussion show is not really a discussion shows at all. And I do miss smart discussions in places that have influence. It seems to me that so much of the TV debate is just not real debate at all. It's just people taking up ascribed positions. This guy is a liberal. This guy is a bigot. Now we'll sit and yell at each other for an hour. And I don't find it particularly enlightening.

There are those who would argue that this kind of media behavior takes its cues from the political culture. And therefore, is politics something you would be also taking a look at yourself?

Yes. I mean, I'm interested. I am actually writing more about politics. I'm interested in it more than I used to be, I would say. But then it seems to me that there isn't a great deal of it, except for, perhaps, Frank Rich [of the New York Times], who takes a more cultural view of politics. Most political writing tends to be straight political Hill coverage. Whereas I think that there's a lot to be said in interpreting some of the stuff we're seeing in a slightly wider context.

Do you feel that the magazine culture has now gone beyond reprieve in terms of catering to the lowest common denominator?

Well, it's very demoralizing--that there was such a sense that to even try to do something deep or serious is not worth the effort because no one's going to read it. And I actually think that that's not true. And I know that at The New Yorker, we put on 250,000 sales, not by being more frivolous, but simply by taking a fresher approach to the serious issues of the day. And I think it's a huge challenge for us to do that and very, very hard to do. I mean, at Talk, it was very demoralizing at times to have so much good journalism that I could and wanted to publish and, at the same time feel the pressure to put it into a kind of celebrity-packaged thing to make the newstand sales that the business plan needed.

What about the fixation on celebrity in magazines these days?

The whole celebrity packaging becomes very tiresome, after a while. And yet at the same time, in trying to achieve high circulation numbers. nobody believes there's another way to get it. The trouble is that the alternative of the slow build takes a lot of patience. And the trouble is that a lot of patience takes a lot of money. So, nobody really wants to spend the kind of money that it takes to build up an audience that's really, a serious reading audience. They want the numbers much quicker than that, and the only way to get that, they feel, is by having the kind of celebrity approach to it. Of course,the celebrity approach is fun. I've done it, and I love it, and I loved Vanity Fair. It was great. But I would like to feel that that's the only kind of journalism, and it's certainly not the only kind of journalism that I'd want to do.

Do you feel that there's been enough of a shakeout in the magazine world--that what we are seeing today is essentially what we'll see five years down the road?

Yeah. I do. I mean, I do think, actually, that although Web magazines have failed, I do actually think that the Internet has taken a lot of readers away from magazines. I think that people do browse the Web a lot, and that's time that might have been spent browsing magazines. I mean, they'd rather sit in front of their computers, and surf around the Web and pick up stuff and read it in a magpie sort of way. It's more bothersome to go out to the newsstand and buy a magazine or incur the cost of subscribing to one. So, I think that has impacted on reading habits even though there is no businesss model yet that has worked for a really successful on-line magazine. I think that there will be still more of a shake out of magazines. A lot of borderline magazines are going to go down. More of them.

What would you say to those who might still be in college or in high school who wish to pursue a journalistic career?

I think for a young journalist, it's better to write for the Web at the moment than it is for print. I think that a voice can be developed there, which is really very good. I think the important thing is to not be following the pack in terms of opinions and subject matter. Nothing is better for a young journalist than to go and write about something that other people don't know about. If you can afford to send yourself to some foreign part, I still think that's by far the best way to break in as a real reporter, by actually having a story to tell that someone hasn't heard. I think there's too much snide, attitude-y non-reporting. I love to run smart essays and commentary But it doesn't replace the other kind of reporting. And in fact, the best kind of commentary is based on reporting. A thumbsucker is not enough in this competitive world. It's important to base it on something that your eyes have seen. It makes it much fresher.

Can journalism be taught? Or is it a skill to be acquired by experience?

I tend to feel that the best way to acquire journalistic skill is by going out and telling stories and writing. I don't know where the journalism courses are at these days. I haven't done one. So, I don't really know. I know it's a major thing in this country to go to journalism school. And I'm sure that there are ways to learn and helpful things you can find in a journalism course. I tend to think the best journalism course is still to become a local reporter, writing about fires and trials and everything that is on offer to give the versatility and the learning of how to make anything interesting. I mean, if you've been made to write stories about the weather, for God's sakes, then you're going to have to find a way to make it interesting, and I think that's very, very good training. I think that's better training. And I think the pressure of a deadline is enormously important. I found a deadline makes you write in ways that you didn't know you could, because of the sheer desperation to fill the space. Any real deadline is going to be more useful to you than any journalistic course.

Your writing and editing has been remarkably cross-cultural, in the sense it's not just for Britain, not just appreciated in America, but, really, by readers almost everywhere. What is it about you that makes you transcultural?

I am a Brit living in America, and I think having that kind of foreign perspective is always useful. I've come from different worlds. I was raised in a family where my father was in the film business, which is a society of people who are very accessible to anything. I mean, film people, like journalists, tend to travel in odd circles. Wherever the movie's made is wherever they're, whoever they're talking to, if you know what I mean. So, that was a help, I think. I think that my general European/New York sort of media background has enabled me to see things in different ways. I'm enjoying writing for a British audience about America and yet, now I'm aware, suddenly that it's being relayed back here. That's actually made me pause a bit. You have to know who you're writing for. I'm just going to write it for myself at this point, and hoping that people like it.

What do you hate about coverage foreign affairs?

The worst thing is this pack attitude. It's just how stale so much foreign reporting is, rewritten stuff coming out of wires and already reported material. One of the things I find most ridiculous about foreign reporting very often is that all the foreign journalists stay together and all hang out at the bar together and all write something similar. It's nutty. The best ones get out, of course. But there is an awful lot of hanging out in the bar with your own colleagues. And although, of course, that must be a comforting thing to do when you're in some scary, benighted place, it's become counterproductive to getting anything real or fresh.

Would encourage your own kids to get into journalism?

Well, I suppose, yes, yes. journalism is the most exciting profession in the world. And I think that it always be. One of the things that 9/11 did was to excite journalists enormously about why they're in the business in the first place. Because journalists have been very tired recently by the constant pressure for numbers and money and, you know, being commercial and being told constantly that serious stories won't sell and all of this stuff. It's very demoralizing, for a talented, idealistic journalist, who set out to be a journalist to expose the demons and right some of the wrongs in the world, to find that people keep telling you there isn't "a market" for that kind of thing anymore. After that whole period after 9/11 journalists were allowed to do what they wanted to and do best, and were allowed to show they could do it. And they wrote wonderful stuff. I saw people rising to the occasion and showing they can still work in that way and want to work in that way.

At this stage of your career and your life, what do you still use to get intellectual nourishment?

Reading history. That's what I'm really big on. I love reading American history, which I never used to read much of. But I do now. European history was a passion when I was at Oxford, and I sort of got out of reading it. It was always, "I need to read the current novel," or something I was extracting for The New Yorker; the text was so enormous that it was usually something I might publish or somebody's manuscript. But it was not work--reading, but not nourishing reading. So, I'm very happy to get back to that.

At this stage of your life, is there something that surprises you about contemporary editors?

When you're written about yourself, your consciousness gets raised a little bit about media and about what kind of journalist you want to be. I'm always startled at how journalists so often copy one another. That's my major beef, I suppose, and I always tried to be the kind of editor who doesn't just commission a story from the same angle as everybody else. Right now editors don't seem to be looking for material that's exciting, and I think it's not that they're not good editors--because there are plenty of talented editors around. I think it's a constant pressure to secure the numbers, the demographics. All these things pummel on editors and take away all their juice. So, then, in the end, they're not even looking for the material that they used to be looking for.

Because of your own celebrity, your skills and your own prominence, you taken a lot of beating in public. How do you deal with this kind of criticism, some of which is not well-motivated and certainly not kind. I can understand why I might be a target. I am kind of used to that now. It's funny how you do become inured to it. Really. I'm far more surprised if it's friendly.

And that would embolden you to stay on in journalism?

Oh, yeah, I love journalism. I always will.