COVERING the news the way we do is always a study in contrasts:

the deliberate pace of current his tory often punctuated by explosive events. The editorial week reflected in this issue of TIME is a particular case in point.

It was clear at the start of last week that civil rights was providing the most significant story. History was being made as federal examiners moved into the South to implement the new voting rights law in the registration of Negro voters. The edi tors scheduled a cover story on U.S.

Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach, the key man in this phase of the civil rights advance, and sent pressward a portrait by Robert Vickrey with a near-op-art background subtly suggesting the voter's X and the black-white confrontation. As is often the case when a course of events reaches such a stage, it was a quiet story that on the surface did not indicate its great significance. TIME correspondents watching the registration process in Alabama, Lou isiana and Mississippi, mindful of the sometimes rough assignments they have had on civil rights stories in the past, reported the air of calm with considerable relief. The South, they concluded, was accepting the situa tion very well.

Then this march of history was punctuated by an explosion. As the grisly riots in Los Angeles grew into chaos, it was evident that the civil rights story of 1965 had taken a new and disastrous turn. Only hours be fore the normal time for the issue to go to press, the editors decided that the events were so important that they called for changing the cover to scenes from the riots.

Like everyone else in Los Angeles, our bureau was taken by surprise when the first riot exploded. But Acting Bureau Chief David Lee, who has handled his share of police calls on a newspaper (the Minneapolis Tribune) and was a writer in THE NATION section before he transferred to Los Angeles, soon got a staff into action. Correspondent Joe Lewis hur ried back from an assignment in Portland, Ore., Bill McWhirter came back from a tour of duty with the Coast Guard Reserve and went right to work, Bureau Chief Marshall Berges interrupted his vacation to cover the facets of the story that demanded his knowledge of the area. One reporter-photographer team drove around the riot zone with a baseball bat on the seat be tween them -- in case anyone came after them. A grapefruit-size piece of concrete came at Photographer Julian Wasser, who suffered a head injury but escaped, recovered and stayed on the job. A team of Negro reporters mingled with the rioters, went where no white reporter could, to get the temper of the mob.

In a very direct sense, the quiet week story that began -- was on which the became cover as another the part of THE NATION section -- is in tricately intertwined with the violent disaster that forced its way to the front before the week ended. TIME'S editors see both as part of a larg er whole that is the often troubled though sometimes satisfying story of what life is about. It is this broader story that all of TIME, from cover to cover, seeks to tell every week.

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