“Twitter is not on the masthead of The New York Times. But Twitter has become its ultimate editor.”

So if the highly regarded Wall Street Journal, in a lengthy and spacious front-page feature, proclaimed to the world that you had utterly failed when you recently took on the hardest challenge of your life—how would you respond?

That’s pretty much what the Journal did in mid-June, I think, when it used a Page 1 headline to declare: “The Results Are In for Remote Learning: It Didn’t Work.” The subhead on the second page stressed the same point: “Remote Learning Falls Short.”

Earlier this month, the big story in journalism was a staff revolt at The New York Times that led to the ouster of the paper’s opinion editor. His decision to publish an essay from a sitting U.S. senator—about an opinion that 58 percent of registered voters share—prompted the revolt.

When I heard that Sarah Schweinsberg was telling “quite a story,” I was all ears. Sarah Schweinsberg is not just an extraordinary storyteller. She is also a voice you’ll hear frequently on The World and Everything in It, our daily news podcast that’s available around the world.

When you pick up your latest issue of WORLD, do you think of it more as a business enterprise—or as a ministry? Do you think first of Truett Cathy or of Billy Graham?

The ideal answer—from my point of view as the magazine’s founder—is that you think of WORLD in both categories. 

Jon Meacham, 50 years old, was managing editor and then editor of Newsweek from 1996 to 2010. He holds an endowed chair at Vanderbilt University and has received a Pulitzer Prize and eight honorary doctorates. His latest book is The Hope of Glory: Reflections on the Last Words of Jesus From the Cross. Here are edited excerpts of our pre-Easter conversation.

Did you major in English at the University of the South (Sewanee) because you wanted to be a writer?

Inside an office room in Bayport, three men in jeans and casual shirts swivel on rolling orange chairs, conferring with each other, answering questions, and occasionally turning back toward large computer screens. Books and periodicals surround them. Upbeat music plays softly in the background.

Outside the office, barred doors, massive exterior walls, and guard towers reveal its surprising location: the inside of a maximum security prison. 

“I have to tell you something today that I wish I didn’t have to tell you,” conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh said on his Monday program. Limbaugh, 69, said two medical institutions confirmed his diagnosis of advanced lung cancer in late January. The broadcaster has been an influential voice on the right for decades after starting his first radio program in 1988.