To Our Readers

By ELIZABETH VALK LONG President

Jim Collins, TIME's newly appointed arts and media editor, is a journalist acutely adept at eyeing and analyzing trends. But in the late '80s he himself became part of a significant one. Like other disaffected Wall Streeters of the ) era, Collins, who holds an M.B.A. from Columbia University, left his job at a New York investment bank in search of something more fulfilling. Thankfully, it was not the simple life that he sought.

"I wanted to get back to writing and journalism," says Collins, 35, who as an undergraduate at Harvard had been a member of the Lampoon, the university's satirical periodical. And so he abandoned the frenetic life of a number cruncher for the frenetic life of a magazine editor, spending three years at Spy, the Lampoon's de facto postgraduate outpost, before joining us last year to put his sharp, imaginative wit to work as the founding editor of this publication's Chronicles section.

There he mesmerized staff members with his trenchant insights and vast breadth of knowledge on subjects varying from Middle East-peace diplomacy to Warren Christopher's neckwear to the dating habits of celebrity twentysomethings -- knowledge enriched by a prodigious reading list that ranges from Commentary to the edgy, grunge-feminist teen magazine Sassy.

Now as arts and media editor, Collins will indulge his passion for culture -- high and low -- full time. A film addict, a native New Yorker who spent his adolescence in downtown jazz clubs and whiles away his grownup years at the opera, Collins brings an intellectually charged hipness to TIME's cultural coverage. "I'm interested in what you might call the culture business and the decisions that are made at movie studios and publishing houses and record companies that affect what people see and read and listen to," he explains.

Collins, who oversaw this week's story on Kurt Cobain's suicide, has been especially fascinated by mainstream media's warm embrace of alternative culture. "In some ways, the story of Kurt Cobain reflects the amazing workings of the music industry, in which the songs of a brilliant, provincial musician are suddenly made available to millions," he says. "Inevitably, though, that process changes the work an artist produces, and in Cobain's case, it contributed to his destruction."

In addition to covering late-breaking media stories, Collins notes that "one of the most exciting things about working in the culture section at TIME is that we have some of the smartest, most articulate critics around." Their words are in worthy hands.