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•RIJU DAVE MEHTA: What do you think about the blurring of lines between news and features?

Well, I don’t know what you mean by features. If you mean features on what Britney Spears was doing yesterday and where Paris Hilton is this week, I don’t regard that as news and, there’s too much of it around.

•RIJU DAVE MEHTA: How does media shape public opinion?

In the new environment, the most important ways newspapers shape opinion is by what they choose to cover and the subjects they go into deeply. People have a lot of sources for opinion these days. I don’t know how to weigh that. Opinion is very nebulous and hard to pin down because a lot of it has to do with whether you heard the news as it happened, or just the recap of it or whether you heard about it on some discussion programme. Were you affected by the incident itself or were you affected by a later comment on it? I am no philosopher of media. My whole life has been involved with getting the story out. I’ve never worried too much about the effects of the story. I don’t think it’s our job to worry about the effects of the story. Our job is to give people information so they have the opportunity of making reasonable judgments.

•SHALINI LANGER: How do you decide the balance between what the people may want to read and what you think the people should be reading? A lot of people want to read about Carla Sarkozy.

I was an editor during the whole dismal Monica Lewinsky thing and we didn’t want to be covering that but obviously, we had no choice. I think you start off by doing what you think matters and then you address the question of what you have to do about Carla Sarkozy on the basis of how new it is. When she was new, you had to something. Now they’ve been married for a while, maybe you don’t have to do much anymore.

•COOMI KAPOOR: So you don’t believe that what the reader wants is what you should give?

I’ve always mistrusted that phrase “the reader wants”, because how do we know exactly what the reader wants? I think you should give the reader a fresh and original paper that’s very well-written and covers all sorts of things —.social trends, fashion, the works but I think you are at your best when you give the reader something the reader wants that the reader didn’t know he or she wanted it till you gave it to her. Nobody is going to abandon you because you went three days in a row without mentioning Sarkozy’s wife.

•PREETI JHA: What advice would you give young reporters?

Don’t get beaten. Figure out what really matters on the beat. Think independently about what’s in front of you. The trouble with editors is that they are influenced in what they demand from reporters by what they read. You have the opportunity to give them something they’ve never read before and another name for that is news.

•KUNAL PRADHAN: After 9/11, a couple of news agencies, especially Reuters, received a lot of flak because they never used and still don’t use the word terrorist. Their philosophy is that one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter. Where do you stood stand on the issue?

I think there is such a thing as terrorism. I have no problem calling Mohammed Atta a terrorist. If you fly an airplane into a building and kill 3,000 people, you qualify. So I am not against the use of the word. But I think it should really be limited to acts of terrorism and organisations that have a consistent pattern of terrorism. I would not mind saying that Hamas has regularly supported and committed terrorist acts. But I think it would be a mistake to call Hamas just a terrorist organisation because it’s many other things — for instance, a political movement that represents a large proportion of people in Gaza at least

•CLAIR MCDOUGALL: Do you think US newspapers cover India well?

I think there are some very good correspondents working in India but my guess is it’s harder to get an India story into an American newspaper today than it was when I was here in the sixties, primarily because there is less space.

•RAJ KAMAL JHA: Is there a story you would like to be done from Delhi that you saw as you travelled through the city?

I have never heard the term ‘encounter cop’ before. In Indian journalism, everybody knows that means a shootout in which some miscreants or witnesses had to disappear. I find that fascinating.

•MANDAKINI GAHLOT: Tell us something about your time as a reporter in India?

I overlapped here with my predecessor, a very distinguished American reporter named Tony Lucas for about half a year. On my first day here, he was off somewhere, and there was a demonstration against cow slaughter in front of Parliament. There were a lot of people on the road. The police told them to disburse. When they didn’t, the police went through the whole British manual on how you deal with a crowd that refuses to disburse and then fired shots in the air and into the crowd from a distance of 30-50 yards. There was havoc — 13 people were killed. Nothing like that had happened since Independence. That was my first story out of India, 36 hours after I arrived here, and it was on top of Page 1 in New York.

A second anecdote: Mrs Gandhi had imposed President’s Rule in West Bengal. I went to interview the governor of West Bengal the afternoon there were demonstrations and cars were being burned outside the building in Kolkata. Later, I heard this story of the French film director Louise Malle who was filming a documentary sequence there: a ministry of information official led Malle up to a police inspector who was in charge of the lathi charge that was to occur outside the building and said to the inspector, “This is Louis Malle, the famous French director, and he requests permission to film your lathi charge.” According to the story, the inspector, a film buff, replied, “I would be honoured to have you film my lathi charge.” I always thought it a good story but I never believed it.

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