You’ve embraced new media with a vengeance. You’re on Twitter, you have a very popular Facebook page — what do you like most about new media? Why do you think you’ve taken to it so well? Even I can be dumb as dirt about a lot of things, but at least I realized fairly early on that the internet is the most fundamental new technology since the steam engine, so I just had to get involved with it.

Do you think that being an early target of internet fact-finding, after the controversy over your reporting on George W. Bush’s military service, gives you a perspective on using new media now that other people might not have? I realized a long time ago that some days in journalism go badly.

A lot of people are talking about a crisis in journalism — whether it’s having to do with continuing to have a bumpy transition from the old media to the new, or the specific challenges that journalists face in an era when people say there are “alternative facts.” Do you think journalism is in trouble? I think journalism is in crisis, but journalism is always in one crisis or another. The crisis now centers on trying to make the transition from old media to new media — and then the second-most-important part of it is the changing dynamics of journalism as a business. What’s happened is that nobody — well, with very few exceptions — has come up with a new business model that can sustain the most important kinds of journalism, like investigative reporting and first-class international coverage. To be a journalist is to be in a tradition, not a profession.