I don’t think I was sent solely to be the print “grownup” over there. I think Jon was eager to send somebody who had the knowledge of the paper’s needs and traditions, but also somebody who could be a guider as well as a spark plug. While I was excited about doing it, it wasn’t until I got there that I realized what the potential was. And I’m forever grateful to the backing Jon gave me in terms of going well beyond breaking news and exploring what we could do with multimedia, interactive journalism, and ultimately with social journalism.

Also, one of the things I felt that I brought was the desire to really promote things. I really feel that one of the best ways of managing your staff and managing your content is showing off the good stuff. I worked very hard to exploit the capabilities of the homepage to showcase the work of our interactive and multimedia guys, to really just push the visual boundaries of what we could do and what we could put in front of people.

It was really walking into that environment. I felt very comfortable on the news front, I knew precious little about the technical aspects of digital journalism. But once I walked into that newsroom and I got to know these people — Fiona Spruill, who was a senior manager in the web newsroom, Gabriel Dance, who was a multimedia producer — when I realized the type of things they were doing and things they were capable of doing, it just opened up all these doors.

The coincidence of timing was also a really, really good thing, because we were prepared to invest in building that staff. We hired Andrew DeVigal as our multimedia editor, that was a very, very big deal. And Andrew then helped Fiona and me build an even bigger and better team. Gabriel Dance had been there when I arrived; we recruited Tom Jackson, who was another really smart interactive and multimedia developer. Just an incredibly good brain, in terms of the technology as well as the journalism.

But within that continuum, we did find dozens of people who had really interesting and good balances between the traditional skills and the technical side. And, you know, they differed. There were some who were a little bit more experienced in producing and editing text, and there were others who were more experienced in working with Flash and other technologies. But we were always looking for people who were both journalists and comfortable with the technological tools that we had and comfortable trying to exploit them.

I think this is something that resulted from the luxury the Times had of incredibly capable staffs of people. But I think that there were — and I’m sure you could find a case — where we had a large project and it had associated with it graphics, and interactives, and video, and photo slideshows. Just the entire gamut of things. I think we learned slowly — and I think the Times is much better at this now, and in fact has instituted a little bit more of a routine — how to try to make sure you’re using the right tools for the right needs. For no other reason than sheer efficiency — I think you have to do that. But I think it’s ultimately better for the audience in really finding that sweet spot of “this is the right type of technology to apply to this information or storytelling challenge.”

It’s an interesting challenge for the newsroom management too. I think that it’s something I learned over time; it did not come to me overnight. I think that it’s something the Times is going to have to continue to work through. You don’t have to understand how to create the information, but you certainly have to understand how it’s used, how it’s consumed. You need to understand how much time it takes, the resource issues, and that’s something you just don’t learn overnight. That will be an ongoing challenge. But as I said, I think the Times has a little bit more structured approach to how you determine how to apply certain tools.

I think a lot of people who have offered a great deal of praise to the avalanche project that was done towards the end of last year, Snow Fall — that to me was an occasion where all the elements did work well together. That’s not actually what I’m pointing to — that’s where I think the real smart use of photography, video, audio, interactive, they all came together in a very smart way. And I think the Times will wisely try to exploit that kind of thinking.

So I think some of those things can be put to greater use. Some of it is going to be a question of resource management, cost/benefit. Certainly in that case, the benefit justifies the cost. I could guess that in the coming year, the Times will probably be capable of doing that — well they did it once last year, so maybe they’ll be able to do it twice or three times in the coming year.

“I certainly won’t pretend a paywall situation is workable for every news outlet on the planet. I think there are circumstances at the Times that are different enough that allowed the Times to do what it did.”

My big worry is that we would lose our reach. That we would, after a period of great growth over the years — including the really booming years of 2007, 2008 — that our audience would shrink.

I worried enormously what it would do to our younger audience. At the time, one of my children was in college, the other was in his final years of high school, and I really worried that a paywall would be a severe impediment to them and their peers in terms of access to what we were doing. We had done a lot of innovative things in terms of covering the 2008 campaign. Certainly judging from the reaction of my daughter and her friends, we were nailing it in that demographic. They were really, really absorbing and loving what we were doing.

Granted 2008 was a special year — Obama had a great deal of appeal to younger people and college audiences, so we benefited from some of that. But I also thought we were doing incredibly good stuff. I didn’t want to discourage usage among her age group, as well as the broader digital audience that, still to a certain degree, expects information to be free.

I fully understand the argument for a paywall. Good information is not free, or certainly isn’t free to create. The costs are enormous. The infrastructure of an institution like the Times — forget about the chunk of real estate, the human infrastructure — is enormous.

It’s funny: Over time, certainly after we introduced the paywall, I began to sort of resent some of the critics who were, “I am not going to pay attention to them because information wants to be free.” Yeah, well, dude, I get it, but, I think really good information can’t always be free. And certainly we saw what the recession did to us and other news organizations. I think the idea that the Times embarked on, of creating another stream of revenue, was something that was really critical to their long-term survival.

So what changed my mind? Well, a couple of things. One, they built a system I thought was really smart. The side doors that were created, that basically allow people access to content from search, from social, from basically the broader open web. If someone sent you to a particular article or some other form of multimedia, we weren’t going to block you. For the most part, uniques remained stable. Ultimately, I think there was a small hit in overall traffic, but I think we retained our audience.

And I think we retained the feeling that the Times was an open site. I think if you compared the Times to some others — certainly something like The Times of London or even The Wall Street Journal — you have a feeling of more openness there. And I really think that was a very good system. It also coincided with the explosion of interest in social media, so we could continue to develop and entertain an audience coming in through Twitter and Facebook and other means. So that was all to the good.

I still don’t know whether young people are still there in the numbers that we saw in 2008. It is hard, without doing specific user surveys — you can’t just look at traffic data and discern what the demographics are. I do worry that there was potentially a long-term consequence among younger readers. But, yeah, I think it worked out really well. I was very happy to stand up in front of public audiences and say, in spite of what I said, I think it’s working really well.

If you look at the iPhone app, when there’s a really big story, and look at how that story is presented on the phone and compare it to some other news organizations’ apps, which are just a list of headlines, a list of articles — if a big story happens, whether it’s Sandy or something in the Middle East, you look at a smartphone and you see in small but truly significant ways we’re trying to create an experience that is not just a feed. It’s a smart feed. It tells people: “This is a big event: Pay attention.”

I think they’ve got to figure out, and I think one of the ongoing struggles will be, how mobile fits into the pay model. Right now, there are these bundles, but I think that they have to face questions of whether they want to break any mobile products away from the bundles.

Then the police or sheriffs began holding press conferences and I started live-tweeting them. The response to that was extraordinary. I remember, viscerally, just realizing: Wow, this is really intense, how people are hungry for this information and hungry for it in this fashion.

I had been using Twitter since 2008. There were other moments in which I really saw the power of it to spread information. But with Gabby Giffords, I felt like that was a moment in which the sort of instant way of spreading information was really intensely valuable through those press conferences. I spent the majority of that day just kind of live-tweeting updates to the extent that I could.

And of course what an incredible year 2011 turned out to be. Within weeks, if not days, of the shooting, we had Egypt, Fukushima, Libya — all of these both immediate and ongoing stories in which people’s hunger for information in real time was filled in a really cool way by Twitter.

Those months between January 2011 and the summer were really a period of intense enlightenment for me. But the whole year was. By the summer, we were starting to get into primary debates, the Republican primary. I remember social being potent during the riots in London, which was also that summer. That’s a period in which I really saw the power of it.