Not long ago Tomas Alejandro Loayza, our correspondent in Peru, sat down and wrote us about his job. Now 49, Loayza was a veteran correspondent before he returned to Lima twelve years ago. He had spent about 15 years on assignments in Japan, the U.S., France, England and Spain covering many major news stories. From Madrid in 1931, he scored a four-hour news beat when King Alfonso fled the country without abdicating, later reported battles of the Spanish Civil War. During the first three years of World War II, he worked for Nelson Rockefeller's committee on Inter-American Affairs, explaining to Peruvians the war aims of the Allies. His report:

One evening at the Maury bar I was talking with a friend about our magazine. I do this often and I enjoy it, for various reasons.

TIME is a newsmagazine, I told him but this word calls for some explaining. Unlike newspapers, TIME aims to report events in context, getting them into their proper perspective and giving you their meaning and intent. We also try to give their "whence" and "whither." Our underlying idea is that events, like living things, all have a past and future--which often hold the main part of their significance.

When you treat events as living things, you must try to convey their color, drama and atmosphere. This effort makes TIME a glutton for detail, which means research, and how.

Men & Trends. This research gives us more than detail; it helps give us structure--the true beginning, middle and end of a story. It is easy--and pointless--to say that bullfighting now faces the worst crisis in the history of the sport. But it is quite a different job to trace the factors which brought aficionados (including me) today's poor fare, and to show what these trends are likely to mean.

Such purposes make a big difference between our kind of reporting and other kinds; it is somewhat like the difference between trying to learn about fishes at a fish market, or taking the trouble to row out in a glass-bottom boat for a direct look-see.

There is another emphasis in our reporting that demands the best a correspondent can give. TIME believes that it is people who make news, not forces or agencies. Every agency is run by people and each "force" or "trend" means nothing, except by its impact upon men. Therefore, we must tell news through the character and motives of individuals. This belief about people making news proves itself best in TIME'S International reporting. A good look into the character of the leaders or representatives of a country can tell the reader in another country more than pages of words about "trends" and "movements."

Critics & Horses. Sometimes I think that the most important part of my work is finding out what is not worth passing on to the reader. This selective process demands a critical attitude and operates in two ways. First there is the information itself, for which sources have been evaluated and cross-checked. In developing the story, facts & figures are organized into their proper place, told as they affect men, not as they look in an account book. Sometimes, for instance, a man's offhand remark in a bar may tell more about him than all his political speeches.

But the selective part of the job has a more subjective side, for any reporter, whether he admits it or not. All along the way the correspondent must judge between good and evil, right and wrong, in all their human shades. If he is to be responsible for his choices, he must be permanently guided by objective moral values: Christianity, democracy, freedom of speech, the dignity of man and other everlasting commonplaces. We the correspondents and editors of TIME are critics --and the critic who denies the existence of such values is like a man who likes to ride a saddle but doesn't believe in horses. A man cannot be neutral in this great partisan age: we are engaged, for or against, in the great struggle for Christian and democratic civilization.

Now what happens when a TIME reporter gets sent on a foreign assignment, say Lima or Rome or Tokyo? He must work by the same standards that we were talking about, but the first thing he finds is that his subject matter, people, is different; they talk and act differently, not like the people he has known in other countries. He will find that their words do not always mean what they say and that often even things are not what they seem. So to his many functions he must add another. American or native, he must be an interpreter, not just of language but of mood and manner. As a TIME correspondent, he must give American expression not only to an alien language but to alien thoughts and feelings.

Punches & Bows. Take Lima, and me, if you please. I came back to Peru twelve years ago after 26 years abroad (I was a kid when I started traveling with my father, who was a Peruvian diplomat and author). First thing that impressed me here was that my countrymen were an emotional lot. Next I noticed that they were given to using high-sounding polysyllables and superlatives. Like Dr. Samuel Johnson, if a limeno "were to make little fishes talk, they would talk like whales." In fact, Latins in general treat four-syllable words with the careless ease North Americans reserve for four-letter words. People in public life, even second-raters, are often described in the newspapers as ilustre, gentil, eminente. Now you just cannot translate some of these words nor the attitude that prompts them. Their English equivalents should be "illustrious," "genteel," "eminent," but they do not mean the same. Use them on a U.S. citizen and you might get a punch in the nose; use the Spanish words on a Latin and you might get a bow from the waist.

Such words must be interpreted, not translated. Unless their use by newspapers has some particular importance in a news event, they obscure the reader's view of what happened. To use these words in an international newsmagazine would be to cast each newsmaker into some sort of vague stereotype. By telling about the people themselves and giving the narrative of what happened, TIME can give its readers in the U.S. and other countries a clearer understanding.

Another One. Now look, I said to my friend at the Maury bar toward the end of my long spiel, all around the world our men are trying hard to get facts, winnowing, sifting, selecting, arranging and finally interpreting them. All this material is then sent to New York where it goes through a similar overall process. All of us have the job of explaining events and people to readers in many countries who often happen to be the most intelligent and well-informed men in the world. My assignment happens to be Peru, which I know well, but no matter how hard I try, my best hope is to do a little better on each new story than on the last one.

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