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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.

Reporters now are better educated than the crowd I knew when I broke in. We still had guys shaped by Prohibition and the Depression, so the news business still had badly paid people who loved it for the life, because every day was different.

You know, I was at CBS News for 28 years. I may have run an unidentified source. Frankly, I don't remember.

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.

I was really lucky to work at CBS news. I was blessed to be able to live my dream in many ways at CBS news.

While the rest of the cable news world moved to opinion, CNN allowed me to stay true to my hard-news roots and supported me with a true commitment to old-school journalism.

Ultimately journalism has changed... partisanship is very much a part of journalism now.

I recognized... very, very early on that ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN and Fox News were dependent on The Associated Press and Reuters. So my daily intake of information is from watching the newswires.

Today, especially, when there are so many stations for viewers to choose from, if they want news, they always come to CNN and that's where I wanted to be.