A Letter From the Publisher

By Robert L. Miller

Suzanne Davis, the operations manager for TIME's news service, was asleep in her New Orleans hotel room last week when the exuberant strains of a jazz band broke the 5 a.m. calm. The music came from a courtyard beneath her window that ABC's Good Morning America was using during the Republican Convention. Though Davis had arranged housing for the TIME staffers who attended the event, she had not been warned that her own hotel would become a predawn television set. "At least," she says wryly, "they were playing a snappy tune."

As the woman behind the scenes of much of our news coverage, Davis has learned to cope with the unforeseen. A native of Chappaqua, N.Y., she began her career in the news business quietly enough, as a secretary at LIFE in 1967. She first encountered the full pressures and unpredictabilities of journalism in 1972, when she went to work as secretary to TIME's deputy chief of correspondents. She later moved to the news desk, which serves as a liaison between our New York City editorial offices and our correspondents around the world. Davis became news desk manager in 1980, and five years later took charge of administrative services for TIME's 28 U.S. and foreign bureaus.

"Within 24 hours, I began to get frantic phone calls from correspondents who were being sent to new assignments," she recalls. "We got into such fascinating topics as 'What can I do with semicircular curtain rods on my new rectangular windows?' and 'Will the company pay to ship my personal 1,000-lb. printing press?' " Some problems were more urgent. When a reporter flew into a war zone, Davis arranged for standby medical aid. "It's a little like being a den mother," she says.

That modest description fails to take into account the full range of her duties. In addition to her more routine responsibilities, such as leasing office space from Beijing to Boston, Davis has supervised the installation of our global computer system. "TIME was in the Dark Ages in 1984," she says. "Many correspondents were working on typewriters and sending their copy by wire." Now, thanks in no small part to training they received from her, they write on computers and use telephone lines to transmit their stories with the press of a key. "Some people take to it like a duck to water," Davis says, "and others require a lot of hand-holding." One incentive for the correspondents to learn, of course, is that they know they can use the system to contact Davis quickly whenever they feel the need for aid, comfort and reassurance from New York.