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Public relations is at best promotion or manipulation, at worst evasion and outright deception. What it is never about is a free flow of information.

In public relations, you live with the reality that not every disaster can be made to look like a misunderstood triumph.

The whole, 'Is the Internet a good thing or a bad thing'? We're done with that. It's just a thing. How to maximise its civic value, its public good - that's the really big challenge.

My view is different. Public relations are a key component of any operation in this day of instant communications and rightly inquisitive citizens.

Sometimes we pay too much attention in Washington to public relations, as opposed to the substance.

Personally I find the democratic chaos of the Internet fascinating, and for the most part really benign.

There is this absurd assumption that the revitalisation of the public sphere is always a good thing. I think people tend to confuse 'civic' and 'civil,' and they believe that everything that is done by citizens is necessarily a good thing because you build a network, an association.

The idea of changing and fixing the problem of how news is presented on the Internet has been recognized for a long time.

With news, especially investigative pieces, you've got to be really smart and really lucky to be timely and to not get beaten by the big guys. You can't go head-to-head with the networks.

Everything is accessible to everyone all the time, and I think there are wondrous things to treasure with what the Internet has made available to journalists. But I think it's also had some effects that are less pleasant. It has chipped away at a sense of privacy and secrecy.