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I love essays, but they're not always the best way to communicate to a larger audience.

Newspaper reporting is really storytelling. We call our articles 'stories,' and we try to tell them in a way that even people who don't know all the background can understand them.

I think all good reporting is the same thing - the best attainable version of the truth.

Reporting provides reminders that things are always more complicated than you think.

It's not just that reporting gives you a bigger slice of life, gives - lends verisimilitude to what you are doing - it's that it feeds the imagination.

Because of social media, we have a lot of personal essays floating around; you see them on Facebook: everyone's either reading them or writing them. Some of them are great; some of them are diary entries put forth as essays.

Sometimes I read reviews, and without exception I will read critical essays that are sent to me. The critical essays are interesting on their own terms.

For me, writing essays is very much about processing ideas and offering them up to the reader so that they are fully cooked.

Good reporting is good reporting, regardless of the newness or oldness of the medium.

I continue to enjoy looking for stories, and trying to do the best job I can reporting and writing them.