From the Publisher

By Louis A. Weil III

Magazines, like most businesses, must keep track of the march of technology. New kinds of machines are constantly being invented, and TIME must determine what and when to buy. In making those decisions, we ask not only how the new equipment will make journalists' work easier and more efficient but also how it will visibly improve the magazine delivered to our readers.

Computers have been part of our lives here for more than two decades. But the machines represented different generations and were not always able, as computer lingo puts it, to talk to one another. In 1987 editorial operations director Gerard C. Lelievre decided that it was time for all our machines to speak the same language. He set out to combine all stages of creating an issue of TIME -- from words, design and pictures to print -- into a seamless electronic process. Lelievre was interested in more than scoring a technological breakthrough. "Computers give editors more flexibility and more control," he says. "This edge provides the reader with a better-looking magazine with more late-breaking news."

Lelievre and technology manager Eileen Bradley began searching for the machines that could do the job. For 18 months, they and editorial systems assistant Alejandro Arce visited computer manufacturers from Boston to San Francisco and evaluated their wares. Arce's experience as an artist who also practiced his trade on a computer was the key to selecting the programs capable of achieving Lelievre's vision of TIME's technological future. In the end the team decided on a combination of Apple Macintosh and Scitex computers. Since February, when the new system went into operation, TIME has been the only magazine of its size to be entirely produced electronically. Until the presses around the world start running each week, no paper is required to assemble the pages of TIME for printing.

"The beauty of it," says Bradley, "is that the new system provides time for creativity in reacting to the news. Editors can preview new layouts, pictures or covers in minutes instead of hours. Even if we switch cover stories only hours before the printing deadline, the magazine still reaches the readers on schedule." That is the real payoff on our investment.