In the past twelve months we have added more writers and editors to our staff than in any other year since TIME began--and perhaps it will add a little to the interest with which you read our stories if I tell you about some of the new names on the lengthening list over there at the left.

For example, one of the new writers in Foreign News is a veteran correspondent whose overseas experience began when he ran away to sea at 16 and worked his way around the world as radio operator on a freighter. After Harvard he worked for the United Press in London, for the New York Times in pre-Hitler Berlin. He spent one summer traveling all over Russia without official guide and in "hard" class railway coaches--slept out-of-doors or in peasants' cottages--saw the Soviet Union almost with the eyes of a native--told the story of his trek in a book (Black Bread and Samovars) that won him a post as Moscow correspondent. Later he was State Department reporter for the Washington Post, came to TIME from the Board of Economic Warfare where he was studying bombing objectives in Central Europe.

Another new Foreign News writer was two and a half years a correspondent in Berlin and Bern--and a third was largely responsible for the New York Times' News of the Week in Review. A new writer in Army & Navy was in Warsaw for the New York Herald Tribune when the Germans blitzed into Poland--stuck it out there after the Government had fled--was one of the last four American correspondents to escape. Still another new writer (World Battlefronts) was sent to London by the A.P. just in time to cover the Blitz and the Battle of Britain, later transferred to the New York Herald Tribune, reached Oran three days after the A.E.F. landed in North Africa. He covered the Casablanca conference, was with our troops when they went into action at Medjez-el-Bab, Gafsa, El Guettar and Fondouk, then marched into Tunis with the British First Army.

TIME'S Education news is now written by an editor of the 15-volume Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, a man who spent three years as Assistant to Director Alvin Johnson in his progressive New School of Social Research. Press is guided by a newspaperman of 13 years' experience--with the Detroit Mirror, as city editor of the Oklahoma News, as telegraph & cable editor of the Pittsburgh Press. One of our book reviewers was consultant on scientific manuscripts at MacMillan's and before that editor-in-chief at Putnam's. And Art now draws on the wide knowledge and background of one of America's outstanding reporter -photographers, the only man ever to be honored by a one-man photographic show at Manhattan's famed Museum of Modern Art.

I wish I had space to sketch the backgrounds of some of the other editors and writers who have joined us in the year just past--to merge their fresh-to-TIME but long experience talents with those of our 46 other editors. But perhaps these examples will serve to show you the kind of newsmen we are adding to TIME'S staff in these days when the news is so hard to get and check and make clear.

Cordially,

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