To answer some of the questions our subscribers have been asking about how TIME gathers, verifies, writes and distributes its news.

More members of our editorial staff seem to have picked up their newspaper experience on Eugene Meyer's forthright Washington Post than on any other newspaper. There are seven Post alumni among our editors and correspondents. One was City Editor, another Assistant Managing Editor.

Other famous big city dailies to which TIME is indebted for more than one of its editors include the New York Herald Tribune and Joseph Pulitzer's crusading St. Louis Post-Dispatch (4 each) . . . the New York Times and the St. Louis Star-Times (3 each)... and the Pittsburgh Press, the Chicago Daily News and the Washington Herald (2 each).

But it is not only the big metropolitan papers that have helped season TIME'S editorial people. The head of one of our foreign news bureaus got his first training in journalism on the Martin, Tenn., Weakly County Press & Martin Mail (weekly circulation 2,240), writing about crops being marketed and calves being born. One of our Senior Editors was a reporter for two years on the weekly Far Rockaway Journal--while the man who heads our editorial office in San Francisco broke into journalism through a job on the Sun-Star in the town of Merced, California (population 10,135).

And 23 TIME men and women worked for the world's great news-gathering services before they came to TIME--five with the Associated Press, six with the United Press, seven with I.N.S., one with N.A.N.A., one with Transradio Press, two with France's Havas and one with British Reuters.

Of course, not all of our editors and correspondents are ex-newspaper men. Our Science editor used to be head of the Chemistry and Physics Departments at one of the great state colleges. The transportation expert in our Business Department ran his own worldwide freight-forwarding business for years. And our Music editor was for a decade violinist with the New York Philharmonic, the New York Symphony and the San Francisco Symphony.

Nine of our editors came to us from other magazines, and several others had written books before they joined our staff. The seven women who are now Contributing Editors each served a long apprenticeship as researchers for either TIME, LIFE or FORTUNE. And many of our best writers came to TIME straight from college and developed right here in our own shop, serving part of their apprenticeship in New York and part in one or more of our news bureaus overseas.

But by and large it is hard to beat a good reporter--and so it is hardly surprising that the total newspaper experience of our staff adds up to well over 300--years. A wideawake young man can learn a lot about people and a lot about news from a few years' experience on the staff of a hard-hitting, well-edited newspaper.

TIME'S job for its subscribers really begins where the newspapers leave off. And so we have found that one of the best foundations a TIME writer can have is a firsthand knowledge of what a good newspaper is and how it works and what it does--and what, by the very nature of its daily deadlines, it must leave to be done by a weekly newsmagazine.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.