From the Publisher

By Louis A. Weil III

The only part of TIME operations that can lay claim to omniscience is the news desk. Sitting by banks of computer terminals, telephones and clocks adjusted to a spectrum of time zones, nine news-desk editors, managers and assistants keep track of our worldwide corps of 88 correspondents, ensuring that editors' questions to them, and their reports from the field, reach the right destinations.

"News-desk staffers sometimes have to call us at 2 or 3 a.m.," says Eastern Europe bureau chief John Borrell, who over the past few months has come to view sleep as a hobby that he once had time for. "In soft, soothing tones that the Metternich school of diplomacy would doubtless endorse, they first apologize profusely for waking you and then tell you that the editors need to know, generally instantly, something like the GNP of each Warsaw Pact country. The secret, which they have mastered, is to be smooth and nonchalant."

If those on the news desk are not actually on the firing line, they sometimes find themselves at least within earshot. "When a deadline looms," says Jean White, a veteran of the desk since 1975, "there is a lot of testiness both in New York and in the bureaus." During a violent night in Beirut in 1984, a correspondent called White, asking that he be allowed to dictate over the telephone his answers to questions posed by a senior editor, rather than send them by telex. Consumed by the deadline rush, White snapped, "Can't you get to a machine? It really would make things easier for us." Suddenly, a loud explosion echoed across Beirut -- and over the telephone line. Said White: "I take that back. I'll write it down."

When correspondent Ann Blackman complained last year that she did not know what to do about Thanksgiving fixings in Moscow, news-desk editor Waits May telexed her a recipe for cabbage dressing. And sometimes the news desk reaches out and nobody's there. May recalls reading an edited story to an exhausted ^ correspondent in Algiers late one night to check its accuracy. After a while he heard only a faint thump-thump on the line. He realized that the correspondent had fallen asleep, and the receiver was resting on her chest.