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

I thought you might be interested in this cable from the head of our Honolulu News Bureau, telling what happened when the first issue of our new Pacific Edition actually came out in Hawai on the publication date of our regular domestic issue:

"Special couriers from the Commander-in-Chief and the Army's Hawaiian Department stood waiting all afternoon for the first copies to come from the presses.

"Next day I got a note of thanks and congratulations from Admiral Nimitz. 'It gives me the same sensation of getting in step with world events that your Air Express Edition gave me when I was stationed in Latin America,' a Brigadier General wrote. "My congratulations to you, your printers and your publisher on a very significant accomplishment.' "Copies landed on the newsstands at 9 a.m., were completely sold out by noon. Today one of the Honolulu papers carries a classified advertisement offering a $10 reward for a single copy of this first edition.

"Our office staff of four is working twelve to fourteen hours a day, seven days a week, to keep abreast of the flood of new subscriptions.

"Because publishing a magazine was a new experience for this office, we underestimated the manpower needed for binding, wrapping, delivery. So the entire staff, its friends, the executives of our lithographing company and their wives were all busy wrapping magazines. I tore out the rear seat of the staff car and personally trucked sixty 80-pound mail bags to the post office to meet the deadline.

"In the last four days all of us connected with the publication have had the experience of people calling us over, opening the magazine and pointing to some story with the remark: 'I just can't get over the fact that we are reading current news!' As one Navy enlisted man said to me, 'Brother, this is something!'"

For overseas Army and Navy subscribers stationed beyond reach of this new Pacific Edition (or the special edition we are printing in Australia each week for General MacArthur's men) we have just made another big change in TIME's service. We began sending their copies by first class mail.

Since this change can mean so much to many servicemen in whom you are personally interested, we are sending you a letter through the mail to tell you more about it and to enclose a special copy of the lightweight "Pony" edition they will receive (because we could not ask the Army Post Offices to carry the fullweight edition as personal mail). And already we have received scores of V-mail letters from soldiers and sailors on far continents telling us what a kick they get out of receiving TIME's news as swiftly as their letters from home.

"I'd read TIME if it arrived a month late," one F.P.O. serviceman wrote us, "but getting your streamlined edition on the minute is the answer to a sailor's prayer." "Your regular edition often took months to reach me way up here close to the Arctic Circle," Lieutenant T.R.P. Jr. wrote us on August 12, "but the August 2 Pony was delivered to me today." And from Somewhere in Africa still another serviceman writes that "TIME is really cooking with gas with its Pony Edition. I get it in twelve days now--and I don't care if I never listen to the British broadcasts again." Cordially,

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