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

Why has TIME--the only magazine in the Associated Press--also found it necessary to develop for its own special use a larger worldwide newsgathering & newsverifying staff than any daily newspaper maintains?

Hardly a week goes by without some subscriber asking a question like this--a question that is all the more pertinent because TIME makes no effort to "scoop" the daily press.

The answer goes right to the heart of the Newsmagazine Idea--for the basic promise we have made you and every other TIME subscriber is not that we will get you the news first, but rather that we will sift through the torrent of news that sweeps past you every day--leave out everything you can afford to skip--and then tell you all the really significant news of the week just as briefly, clearly, memorably and understandingly as we know how.

The raw material for TIME'S first worth of newspapers and magazines which our editors "mined'' for news. And they still "mine" hundreds of papers for you each week--papers in French and German and Russian and Spanish and many another tongue--so many of them that it would take you more than 19 days of continuous reading to plough through a single issue of each of them (even if you could read all the languages).

From these newspapers we still get a thousand times as much news as you would want to read in TIME--and on top of that our Associated Press wires bring in some 10,000 news-words an hour, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Why, then, should TIME, on top of all this mountain of news, still feel that we need our own reporters in every newscenter of the world?

Here are some of the reasons:

To clear up points otherwise left in doubt. (In a single day recently our Washington office alone was asked to check on 88 different points.)

To cover significant stories the newspapers with their hourly deadlines are not geared to cover.

To keep our editors posted on the people in the news, so our subscribers can understand the event in terms of the personality who caused it. (Joe Stalin drinks his "vodka straight. Admiral Turner of the Central Pacific delights in growing roses. Air Marshal Harris' men love him because he is "so bloody inhuman.")

To make sure our editors in New York have the local background they need to measure for you the true significance of the sometimes underplayed, sometimes overplayed news that breaks thousands of miles away.

To keep our editors well-informed in advance about the policies and decisions and changing conditions they may have to report to you next week or next month when these events erupt into headlines.

To cover for us developments in fields most newspapers hardly attempt to cover, like Radio, Education, the Press--and departments where, newspapers give only local coverage, like Music, Theater and Art.

To keep us posted on what plain people the world over--people who never get into "the news"--are thinking and talking and arguing about.

Each of TIME'S 56 editors could probably add another reason--but perhaps these seven are enough to indicate the answer to your question.

Cordially,

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