Lionel Barber

There is no conflict between best in British class and being a global newspaper. We are an international newspaper rooted in the City of London, and I think people understand that. The 'FT' stands out as a global niche product.

My father was a journalist for 50 years in Leeds and Fleet Street. I thought about a career in business to show I could do something different, but the reaction among prospective employers was, shall we say, underwhelming.

In hindsight, Watergate was a curse as well as a blessing for American journalism. The courageous reporting of the 'Post' and the 'New York Times' - coupled with the favourable Supreme Court rulings on publication of the Pentagon Papers - were landmarks for the interpretation of First Amendment rights and the freedom of the press.

All our reporters and editors now work seamlessly in print and online. This integration has transformed the way we work. I believe this is vital to the success and growth of newspapers.

My own special relationship with America began at an early age. My father, a fellow journalist, named me after Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

For the BBC and others, a free website is an obvious and relatively cheap addendum to their main purpose of streaming news and entertainment on screen to a mass audience.

While the web is very much the first draft of history, a rough-cut, it still has to be good journalism, well-sourced, reliable. Clearly, the printed form is going to have more effort put into it, going to be more reflective and relevant.

By using our international network, utilising templates and thinking ahead with pre-planned pages that contain carefully selected relevant news, we can deliver stories that other people just don't have. And that will release resources for the web.

There were always plenty of newspapers in the house. 'The Times', 'Guardian', 'Daily Telegraph' and 'Daily Mail' were all regular fixtures on the coffee table. I used to enjoy reading 'The Times' editorial pages and the 'Daily Mail' sports pages.

The advent of the Internet exposed the fact that the old business model for newspapers was broken. The world wide web fundamentally changed the media eco-system, challenging established journalistic practice in what is known as the mainstream media: radio, television, newspapers and magazines.

We don't need to update the paper through the night, so we don't need so many people working anti-social hours producing a newspaper for real-time news. That's the equivalent of the steam age.

Thanks to social media such as Facebook and Twitter, a far wider range of people take part in gathering, filtering and distributing news.