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At the end of the day, my focus will be to make the 'Evening News' as strong from an editorial perspective as it possibly can be.

The 'Evening News' is going to have a long run, both as a broadcast and as a presence online and on cellphones. It is a franchise with a very rich tradition.

We now assume that when people turn on the evening news, they basically already know what the news is. They've heard it on the radio. They've seen it on the Internet. They've seen it on one of the cable companies. So that makes our job a bit different.

Watching the evening news in 2011 is a strange time-travel experience. 'The CBS Evening News,' 'ABC World News' and 'NBC Nightly News' haven't changed their style over the decades, still going for that old-fashioned mix of voice-of-authority pomp and feel-good fluff. The difference is that people aren't watching.

Working on 'Newsroom' has given me an appreciation of the struggle that you go through on the 24-hour news cycle. The people who are legitimately attempting to deliver honest news are really facing a tough, uphill climb that's a lot harder than any other time in history.

What is news? It's hard to quantify. Certainly news has changed completely, and the morning shows are not really designed to bring you the news, except to tell you what happened overnight, and the rest of it is a kind of magazine mentality - a little bit of this, a little bit of that. It's harder to be an educated and informed citizen.

The perception is that more important people watch news in the evenings than in the mornings.

I think it'd be great if the evening news broadcast, for instance, were unsponsored and unrated.

It's amazing that the amount of news that happens in the world every day always just exactly fits the newspaper.