Did She Say Hog Lagoons?   

Biggest disappointment when she was named editorial page editor: "I was about to go to South Dakota for my definitive tour of South Dakota. I've always wanted to go to South Dakota." One big stop she would have made on the tourÐhog lagoons. That's a large lake of hog manure, in case you don't know. "I have flown over hog lagoons in very, very small planes in North Carolina, and I've flown over cow lagoons in helicopters in Waco. I am an expert in flying over large pits of manure in fragile aircraft."

How she celebrated her promotion: "Howell [Raines] gave this little dinner.... There were maybe a dozen people, from the Times mostly. But my parents flew in, which was really neat. Their lifelong dream of spending an entire evening listening to people say how wonderful their children are.... Then, my husband and I went to the country."

On the voice of the Times' editorials: "The Times' voice is certainly not my voice. But it's a combination of stuff. There's a lot of precedent. There are a lot of sort of core positions [of] the paper itself, the Sulzberger family.... As publishers, they're remarkably unobtrusive. But it's their trust, and they've got a right to be involved. And there's the board, which is a very opinionated bunch of people. And then there's me, and all that stuff sort of gets mixed up together and becomes the voice. And so, I think, every editor...changes the voice some.... It wasn't Howell's voice, but it changed when Howell took it over. And I think it'll change some when I take it over, and it'll change when the next person takes it over. But it's not my voice. It's just the Times' voice with a different perspective."

On giving up a column: "It's always hard to give up a column." But Collins notes that she has given up four of them in her career. "Writing a column is the best job in the world, but it takes a lot out of you." When she joined the Times' editorial board, "it was such a relief for quite a while, for longer than I thought, it was just really a relief to know that if you wanted to just write something straight and not try to be incredibly witty, it was OK.... Sometimes if you've got stuff and it happens to fall together right, you think, 'Oh my God, they're paying me for this. This is amazing. This is wonderful.' But then other times...it's just dragging.... You feel so exposed and so responsible. It's a tough job."

Little-known fact: She wrote theater reviews while at United Press International in the '80s. "The off-broadway theater critic died at his desk," she says of how the opportunity came about.