For new readers--and to refresh the memories of the rest of us--this is the first of a series of Letters on TIME'S kind of journalism, to appear occasionally in this space. Most of them will be based on TIME, The Story of an Experiment, written by the editors on the occasion of our 25th anniversary.

It costs about $1.50 a word to write TIME these days, and that includes editorial costs only--no paper, printing, distribution or other expenses. Why does it cost so much? In the past, news has been adequately transferred from mind to mind for far less than that.

The world community of 1950 has a much more difficult news problem. Knowledge in the 20th Century--while enormously greater than ever before--is very unevenly distributed. Specialists are everywhere--on the faculty of a university, even among members of the same household. Various publications address themselves to specialists: one speaks to the physicist, another to his wife (who can't do long division), another to their son who is absorbed in music, another to their neighbor whose consuming interest is politics. But all these individuals have to pull their weight in the same civilization.

On this common meeting ground stands 20th Century journalism's great responsibility. Journalism has to talk to the physicist, his wife, his musician son and his political neighbor all at once.

TIME'S $1.50 is spent in an effort to tell the reader--in this 20th Century community of specialization, complexity and confusion--what the news is, and to tell it in such a way that the reader will take it in and be able to use it Use it how? To make money? To impress his acquaintances? Possibly. But chiefly to make him think and care about his world. People living today in the U.S. and other parts of the free world are engaged in a great historical experiment; they are faced with the challenge of establishing and extending the first democratic civilization. For them, news has a meaning that it did not have in the days of Pericles or Pitt. The decisions of the 20th Century rest with the people. To act, they have to know and to care.

The reader's assimilation of news will never be "effortless." TIME, however, tries to sift, sort, condense and explain the news by this simple standard: How much effort can an ordinarily educated and intelligent man or woman be expected to use in understanding this story? It's no use saying that 80 million Americans ought to have a thorough grasp of physics by this time next year. Whether they ought to or not, they won't. Until they do, the journalist who wants to communicate anything about physics must continue to explain certain rudiments in terms that readers will understand. A journalist who gives his reader simple but necessary background material departs from a practice which a great contemporary philosopher* has called "the tiresome pretense that writer and reader know more than they do."

The reader must be told the news event. Sometimes, that is enough; the event may be part of a series just as well known to him as it is to the editor. More often, the reader wants to know where and how the event fits. TIME aims to tell the man who came late to the ball game what the score is, who made the runs, and how the prospect looks. Nobody is on time for all the ball games.

*Harvard's Emeritus Professor William Ernest Hocking, in Freedom of the Press.

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