Covering Your Family

By Dan Goodgame, Assistant Managing Editor

About a year ago, we launched a new section called Personal Time, designed to offer our readers useful information and advice based on each week's news of personal finance, health and technology. The section has been a hit with our subscribers and our peers, who recently awarded national prizes to two of our columnists for excellence in service journalism and commentary. And this week we're expanding Personal Time with a fourth page called Your Family.

Like the other Personal Time pages, Your Family will be updated right through Saturday to include the freshest topics on readers' minds and in their dinner-table conversations. "The big push here at TIME these days is to report on news and issues that affect our families, from how to make our kids better students to what to do to help our aging parents," says Walter Isaacson, TIME's managing editor. "Big Government has become less relevant to our lives. What we do as citizens to build better families, schools and communities has become more important--and interesting."

Over the past year, we have run many family-related covers on such subjects as homework, Ritalin, genealogy and growing up online. Yet, as our health columnist, Christine Gorman, explains, "the news most useful to people often doesn't make big headlines." It takes an expert columnist to dig it out and turn it into practical advice. And we've recruited two of the best to take turns writing our family column.

Contributor Amy Dickinson, 39, caught our attention with her thoughtful and funny commentaries for National Public Radio and America Online. She has also worked as a producer for NBC News, as a lounge singer and as a free-lance writer. Amy grew up on a dairy farm in upstate New York, and her work draws on experiences with her large extended family. She attended college on a partial field-hockey scholarship--which helped prepare her for this week's column on sportsmanship. Now living in Washington with her 10-year-old daughter, Amy teaches Sunday school and occasionally substitutes at a local nursery school.

Alternating with Amy will be Michael Lemonick, 45, a senior TIME writer who specializes in science, health and behavior. He has written 27 TIME cover stories, as well as other articles on family issues, including the recent controversies over spanking and late toilet training. Mike, his wife Eileen and their 10-year-old daughter live in Princeton, N.J., where Mike grew up. Eileen's son, now 27, lived with them in a shared-custody arrangement during his teens.

If Mike's and Amy's columns only whet your appetite for more, we also offer TIME for Families, an expanded edition of TIME that includes, six times a year, additional features related to family life. And each week during the school year, we publish TIME for Kids, the newsmagazine written especially for students ages 8 to 14. These extras can be included free with your subscription to TIME. Just dial 1 (800) 843-TIME.