To Our Readers

By ELIZABETH VALK LONG President

Week 1 on any job can be nerve-racking -- all of those new faces, new procedures and new coffee machines. At TIME, with the added pressures of a weekly newsmagazine, it can be positively manic. So Lee Aitken, our newest senior editor, was already busy enough last Thursday evening when, four days into her first week -- and less than 48 hours from deadline -- she was asked to oversee our late-breaking cover story on Susan Smith, the young South Carolina mother accused of murdering her children. It was an assignment whose challenge amounted almost to hazing, but Aitken brought it off with skill and aplomb.

Were her new TIME colleagues surprised? Not a bit. Aitken, after all, came to us after seven years at our corporate-cousin publication PEOPLE, where she built her reputation by deftly managing first the magazine's book and theater departments, then its news sections. She edited dozens of PEOPLE cover stories, including those on the Polly Klaas kidnapping and the Baby Jessica DeBoer case. The latter was particularly meaningful to Aitken, a single parent who adopted her daughter Sophie, 3, in Bulgaria after a two-year search for a child. "Lee has an amazing way of expanding the dimensions of a story, making it grow beyond the confines of its narrative," says senior editor Howard Chua-Eoan, a former PEOPLE editor himself. "She will remember past incidents that give resonance to present, a quote by some authority that still proves illuminating, the name of an expert who must be tapped."

Harvard-educated, Aitken was managing editor of the political weekly In These Times and a founding editor of New England Monthly. "I've done policy journalism and what's called personality journalism," she says, "and I think my assignment at TIME can combine the best of both: putting a human face on issues and finding the lessons for us all in personal tragedies like Susan Smith's."

Our report "Follow the Money" ((TIME ON CAPITOL HILL, Nov. 7)) provided campaign-finance information on congressional candidates using data from Federal Election Commission reports. Several candidates complained that although they do not accept PAC money, figures for PAC donations appeared in their listing. The amounts in the PAC column included donations from political committees acting as PACs, some of which are candidate-campaign committees that take money from PACs. Our column heading should have reflected that fact.