"A very useful word is 'KOMING' When lack of data gets benumbing. When a fact is not on tap, KOMING quickly fills the gap. When up against a realistic Need to use a small statistic, Writers keep their KOMING humming

By KOMING use of KOMING KOMING."

Every news writer (like the one who eased a frustrated moment by scribbling these lines) is likely to discover in midstory that there are dozens of details about which he needs more information than he has on hand.

If he is a newspaperman writing against his deadline he all too often has no chance to go back and get these extra facts. But a TIME writer, whenever he needs more complete information, types in "KOMING" or the two capital letters "TK" (meaning: goes on writing.

When the first draft of a story is turned over to the researcher there are sometimes as many as twenty "KOMING's"--and for each of them the researcher must find an answer. Often the bill for clearing up a single TK will run over $100, and it once cost us $300 just to make sure that the highest price ever paid for a magazine article up to then was $30,000 (to Calvin Coolidge, for a 1929 article in Cosmopolitan).

Subscribers often ask us how our research girls run down all the extra facts you find in TIME stories, and the answer isn't a simple one. For example, the researcher can sometimes fill the gaps in Draft One of a story by digging through some of the 23,000 books in our library or some of the 400,000 folders in our "morgue." Sometimes it takes a telephone call to some top authority to turn the trick. But far more often the answer requires a wired or cabled query to one of our U.S. or overseas correspondents.

Here, for example, are some of the unlikely questions put to TIME correspondents and answered for TIME'S editors during these past four weeks as just one small part of their duties:

Los Angeles: Rechecking length of atomic age according to Paramhansa Swami Yogananda. Is it 100 or 1000 years? Also: Are fleas bad in all Southern California or just in some sections?

Seattle: Press plans story this week on women reporters' powder room aboard Navy ship. What kind of ship? Name? How many women went on trip and who were they? Will ship be used regularly?

Chicago: Who bought solid gold shaving bowl selling at $1875 plus tax, minus soap?

Chapel Hill: Does Davis Poplar still spread its shade over campus at University of North Carolina?

Des Moines: Need color for story on Iowa Packing Co. walkout. What are duties of sausage stuffer? What is a check sealer? Or is it a scale checker?

Boston: Was the LL.D. that Harvard President Conant just received his 14th honorary?

London: Scheduling story for Music on first London jam session. Did band and audience stop for teatime intermission?

Atlanta: Do children and parents attend class together in Rabun Gap-Nacoochee School?

Newsverifying queries like these make up only a small part of the dozens of wires and cables that pour out of our New York office each week to our correspondents at home and overseas. By far the greater number of these messages are in connection with our newsgathering--to steer our correspondents along channels that will help our editors bring you a clearer, more complete, better connected story of the week's news. But add them all together--and I think you'll see why our News Bureau's bill for outgoing messages alone was $40,000 last year.

Cordially,

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