Q: What has surprised you about the Globe more than anything else?

A: Some people have asked me that. I can’t say that I’ve had a lot of surprises because I did, I think, a fair amount of research before I got here, and so I was fairly well prepared in terms of what I thought the newsroom would be like, that sort of thing. And there are certain commonalities between one newsroom and the next one. And so I wasn’t terribly surprised by very much.

Q: I think people at the Globe believe that their problems and their virtues are absolutely unique, but maybe thinking they’re absolutely unique is common to many newsrooms, too.

A: I have a friend who long ago told me that after you’ve worked at enough newspapers you learn what’s common among newspapers generally and what’s distinct between newspapers, and which problems are distinct and which ones are common to journalism in general. And obviously I’ve worked at enough newspapers where I can make comparisons, and there are just a lot of things that are fairly common to newsrooms as a whole.

Q: Is there anything that stands out about the Globe newsroom that really is different from anything you’ve encountered elsewhere?

A: A lot of people here have grown up in the Boston area. A lot of them went to school here, grew up here, their first jobs were here. They’ve been here with the Globe for a long time — I think probably more than at most newspapers where you typically find a greater range of backgrounds. In LA, for example, you don’t necessarily find people who grew up in LA. In fact, you find very few people who grew up in LA. I think the same would be true in Miami, although there’s a portion of the staff that grew up in South Florida or Florida. At the New York Times, of course, there are a lot of people from all over the country.

But people who grew up in Boston, a lot of people want to stay in Boston. They find it a very attractive place to live, and people who’ve been away for even a short while seem to want to come back.

Q: Is that good or bad?

A: Both. It can be both good and bad.

Q: The Globe has gotten a lot of praise for its coverage of the terrorist attacks and the aftermath, both here and overseas. What sort of a learning experience this has been for you?

A: I don’t know. I haven’t had really time to think about what kind of lessons I take away from this. In many ways, I think it’s very similar to other big stories. There are more aspects to the story, more angles to the story than any story that I’ve ever worked on before — everything from bioterror, to international policy, to war strategy, to the internal politics of Afghanistan, to the internal politics of Pakistan, to emergency preparedness in the United States. There just seem to be an infinite number of subjects, and staying on top of that I think is an enormous challenge in figuring out how to stay ahead on the story. And I think that’s been a challenge.

But to be quite honest, I’m not sure that there’s any special new lesson that I’ve taken away from this at all. I think that one’s experience covering other big stories pretty much applies to this one. I’m certainly concerned about the safety of the people in the region, and I don’t know that there’s a lesson there. I just think that we have to be very careful.

Q: You may have more resources than most big regional papers do at this point, but obviously you have fewer resources than the New York Times, the LA Times, the Washington Post. And yet you’ve been trying to do the complete package. How do you compete?

A: Well, we do supplement our coverage with the wires. We do use some Washington Post stories, some LA Times stories, obviously stories from the Associated Press and from any number of other wires. I think that what we want is for our people there to be covering the main story and also to be looking for enterprise that will set us apart, and to just try to think ahead, to think quickly. These stories have a very short shelf life. Reporters are traveling in groups in many instances, or in pairs. So whatever we’re working on, somebody else also might be working on at the same time. On top of that, the situation’s changing so rapidly that no story lasts forever. So we’re just trying to think, what can we do next?

The other important thing is that we paid very close attention to the implications of the attacks for our own community, in terms of the security of Logan Airport and the running of the management of Logan Airport, and even beyond that, sort of what lessons that held for the structure of government and the running of the bureaucracy right here in Massachusetts. The issues of patronage and qualifications and things of that sort. We wanted to not forget that this is a story with important local angles as well.

Q: Were you surprised by the extent to which Logan Airport was just permeated in politics rather than being more professionally run, as airports do seem to be in other parts of the country?

A: If you do a little research on the Miami Herald, you’ll see that even before I got there they’d done a substantial series on mismanagement of the airport in Miami. And of all things, the general recommendation there, by the newspaper itself in its editorials, was that there should be an authority running the airport. That seemed to be the way out. Certainly, our news coverage demonstrated that there could be many problems with airport authorities as well, and that there have been in other places. But Miami was considered to be a mismanaged airport. They brought in a new director there.

The problem there wasn’t much patronage as it was the county commission sort of micromanaging the airport, and companies’ that had a special relationship with the county commissioners being able to get contracts and not performing well. Here it was much more a traditional patronage kind of system. Yeah, I was surprised, because that hasn’t particularly been the system in Miami or in LA, where I worked before. And just the extent of it was fairly remarkable. I think some people take it for granted, and I don’t think they should take that for granted, not at Massport and not in the rest of government, either. My sense is that ordinary citizens didn’t know that much about it and are not pleased with it, either.

Q: Although there was a lot of cost-cutting at the Globe earlier this year, during the 1990s it was able to maintain and even expand its foreign bureaus, which had been deemed a luxury at some similar-size papers. What kind of an edge has that given the Globe in covering the war in Afghanistan?

A: I would make a couple points, first of all, about the cutbacks. Even in the course of this year the paper has invested in a variety of areas in terms of its technology coverage and in terms of improving its coverage in the zones [the weekly zoned suburban editions]. So there’s been a significant investment even as there’s been some scale-back in other areas, and my expectation would be that we would be investing strategically even into next year.

With respect to foreign bureaus, I think it’s given us a tremendous edge. I do think that foreign coverage is very important. I think that those news organizations that came to the conclusion that foreign coverage was not important were mistaken. I think that there should be a great interest in the United States and what’s happening overseas, because what happens overseas affects us in a meaningful way here and in a lot of places. And if that wasn’t clear before September 11, it certainly should be clear by now. And so I think it gives a tremendous edge. We had people overseas who had covered Central Asia, the Middle East for any number of years. They were experienced reporters, knowledgeable reporters, people who knew that region, and I think that gave us an enormous edge in covering the story. And you know, we had Charlie Sennott, David Filipov, and lots of people who had covered the region before.

Q: That was really an amazing story about David Filipov, who lost his father in the terrorist attacks and went right back into the coverage.

A: Yeah, right. And he’s there again. He came out for a little while, but he’s back in there.

Q: I think a lot of people assume that by now you would have announced some fairly ambitious plans to restructure the staff, the coverage, or both had September 11 not intervened. Can we expect some fairly dramatic announcements at some point?

A: I think I’ve made pretty clear to the staff what my plans are for the paper, but it didn’t necessarily include dramatic restructuring of beats and staff. I think I felt all along that I would spend some time trying to get to know the staff, getting to know the capabilities of the staff. And I’ve found the people on the staff to be quite capable and to be very willing to change, and have been very receptive to some change as well. I have not seen the need yet for any radical shake-up, and I’m not sure that I will. This is a determination that we will make.

I think we’re doing a good job as a newspaper. That’s what matters to me. I want to make progress as rapidly as we possibly can. But I don’t believe in changing staff solely for the sake of changing staff. I think that the Globe has, and has long had, very capable people here. And if people have skills and talents to bring, I certainly want to take advantage of that. I would be foolish not to.

Q: What do you think the Globe’s strongest points are?

A: Well, you hit on it, actually, in the story that you wrote about our coverage of September 11, and that was the depth and the breadth of the staff and the coverage. I think that we’ve got a lot of people here who are very experienced and very knowledgeable in any number of areas, and that turns out to be quite a large number of areas, in fact. That’s a great strength. We also have some really fine writers.

Q: What do you think are the weakest points of the paper?

A: I’m not sure I want to lay out a real critique of the paper. You reported what I said, and I was quite open with you actually in terms of what I said on the first couple of days. I want to make sure that we’re always competitive, that we have a strong news edge to the paper, that we not be beaten by our competitors on any story of note. I include in our competitors not just the Boston Herald by any means, but national papers as well. It would be the New York Times on certain kinds of stories that are particularly important to us, significant to us, in areas where we want to excel — and that would be things like health care and technology and higher education and the management of money and the arts. We want to excel in those areas, and we don’t want to be beaten by the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal or the Washington Post or the LA Times.

I want to make sure that we always have a strong news edge and we’re always very competitive, and that the paper has a strong sense of urgency and immediacy and relevance of topicality whatever we do. And on top of that, I don’t want daily stories to sort of pass us by without us exploring those stories in depth. And I want to make sure that when something happens as a daily news event, that we don’t treat it as a discrete news event — that we explore the broader implications of it and that we offer greater context and perspective and depth.

Q: Do you think the Patricia Smith and Mike Barnicle scandals of 1998 said something telling about the culture of the Globe? Do you think Matt Storin succeeded in changing that culture by the time you arrived?

A: Well, I don’t know. I wasn’t here and, quite honestly, I really don’t even want to talk about those cases. I’m not in a position to judge. I wasn’t close enough to the Globe to know what the culture was at the time, what the problems were at the time, so I think it’s impossible for me to say. People may dwell on these incidents of the past. What I’m trying to do is focus on how do we just make a better paper in the future. And frankly, those incidents are not particularly relevant to what we’re trying to do in the future.

I do believe that it’s important that we have rigorous editing of the paper at every level, whether it’s at the assignment level or the copyediting level or the news-desk level, or whatever it might be. That we are always asking questions, that we don’t necessarily accept stories as they’re delivered. I think one of the great strengths of a paper like the New York Times, and one of the qualities that sets it apart from most other newspapers, including newspapers of equivalent size, is that they have a very strong editing process. They ask a lot of questions. In fact, a lot of stories are rescued at the desk. And people are not reserved about asking questions. They know that it’s their job to probe, to inquire, to challenge, and really to act as a proxy for the most critical readers of the paper. And we need to do that as well. One of the things that I have done, that I will be doing even more, is encouraging all editors to look at things more critically.