"From Nowhere to Somewhere"

Journalists who have resolved to tell the news through the actions, characters and motives of people have committed themselves to dealing in narrative. Unlike most newspaper "stories," which are not narrative, many TIME stories are, in fact, stories. In 1940, Manfred Gottfried* (then managing editor, now chief of foreign correspondents), who has written as many TIME stories as any man, jotted down some thoughts on how it's done: "The basis of good TIME writing is narrative, and the basis of good narrative is to tell events 1) in the order in which they occur; 2) in the form in which an observer might have seen them--so that readers can imagine themselves on the scene. A TIME story must be completely organized from beginning to end; it must go from nowhere to somewhere and sit down when it arrives."

Sustained narrative requires a wealth of the kind of detail that newspapers and press associations do not ordinarily carry. In 1929, when TIME sent its first correspondent,/- David Hulburd, to Chicago, it began to discover that narrative quality could be greatly improved by TIME'S own on-the-spot reporting.

Through the '30s, TIME moved very reluctantly into the field of direct reporting. It feared the loss of a unique quality in the Newsmagazine--its coherence, its perspective. Wouldn't a lot of TIME bureaus change the Newsmagazine into just another grabbag of unrelated reports from hither & yon?

The war settled TIME'S problem. Here was a story so far outside the experience of any editor that it had to be covered at firsthand. TIME & LIFE sent scores of men to the newsfronts and battlefronts of the world. TIME gave its readers firsthand reports and, at the same time, discovered that one of the most important contributions it could make toward war information was the overall view, the weekend summary of the war's perspective. This was usually the first story in the World Battlefronts section, and was always written in the New York office. A typical story (July 12, 1943) of this kind began: "Thoughtful soldiers and officials in London and Washington last week had to turn their attention to a serious new war problem: the exuberant optimism now sweeping the Allied world and lessening the Allied war effort. For proof that the effort had lessened, the U.S. Army had only to look at the production figures, down in May, down again in June.

"Because the Allies had established some of the conditions of victory, too many people assumed . . . that the war was all but won. The facts . . . were different."

Then it went on to summarize the news of each major front.

TIME'S Robert Sherrod, veteran of New Guinea, Attu, Tarawa, Saipan and Iwo Jima, remembers that these stories had as much to do with TIME'S popularity among overseas servicemen as the action reports. Says Sherrod:

"The men who were doing the fighting were disgusted with reports in some newspapers which picked the most optimistic phrases out of the communiques, and won the war every afternoon. The virtue of TIME'S weekend summary of the news was that it seemed realistic to those who knew that they had two or three more years of the same dreary, bloody business ahead of them. TIME got to be a sort of bible in the forward areas because TIME seemed to know what it was talking about."

This kind of war coverage was a result of deliberate policy. As one office memorandum put it:

"Let us take no risk whatever except when conscience compels us. We should not expend any 'risk' for the sake of having a scoop, for the sake of being the 'wise guy,' for the sake of attracting attention or being entertaining. . . . We must be scrupulously careful not to confuse what is happening with what we devoutly wish may happen."

* Gottfried was TIME'S first editorial employee. His personal diary shows that he was repeatedly late for work--a 5 p.m. arrival was an extreme case--and often disagreed with his superiors' changes in his copy. (These characteristics of TIME'S first writer are still strongly marked in the breed.)

/- In January 1926, when Gottfried visited Washington, he noted that no TIME representative had been there for a year.

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