To answer some of the questions subscribers are asking about how TIME gathers, verifies, organizes and writes its news

Just about the biggest advantage a TIME writer has over a newspaper reporter racing for his deadline is the help of a trained research assistant always at his elbow to help dig out the facts he needs to make his stories vivid and clear and factual.

There is no other system like it in all the world of journalism, and so perhaps you might like to know a bit more about these girls-and also about their unique veto power to keep out of TIME any statement for which they cannot find clear documentation.

Researchers who can live up to such a responsibility have always been hard to find. Last year we interviewed 1,200 applicants to get ten new researchers. They have to be college graduates, and we like them to have had newspaper experience and to have traveled a lot. But each has her own field-and special jobs require special training. For example, when we needed a researcher to back up Mapmaker Chapin we went to Clark University, famous for its emphasis on geography, and asked the faculty to recommend a graduate for the job.

Another came to us via a Carnegie Traveling Fellowship and a job under John Winant at the International Labor office in Geneva; one prepared at college for a diplomatic career; another ran a hospital clinic in New York for four years; two were on the staff of the College of Physicians and Surgeons, and two were analysts for Standard Statistics before they came to TIME . . . One (a graduate economist) researched for the OPA in Washington-and one was a reporter in Europe from the Austrian Anschluss to the Polish invasion. Another came to us from the Sunday Express of Johannesburg, South Africa; another worked for the AP in Copenhagen until the Nazis came; still another ran a Wall Street investment office practically single-handed for two years . . . And our most erudite is an art and archeology graduate of the University of Paris, got her doctorate at Columbia in fine arts and philosophy.

The TIME researcher works like a mental filter for her editor-writers- each week sifts through thousands of words of basic material. She constantly turns up unsuspected angles, significant bits of history, piquant, enlightening facts. And then, after the story is written, she checks every word of it for accuracy.

I suppose this checking process is kind of hard on TIME'S writers-for our researchers are paid $100,000 a year not to believe anything. In time the editors learn to take this skepticism for granted, forestall it whenever possible:

Last week when one of TIME'S Business editors wanted to work into a story the meat of a conversation he had had with one of America's most prominent business figures, he did not even try to argue it past his researcher on his own say-so. He got the man at the other end of a three-telephone hook-up-read the statement to him-let his doubting Thomasina hear the okay with her own ears.

They are not infallibly right-an unfriendly fact attested by a grim volume called The Black Book, which contains the record of all their errors from the beginning of TIME. But it is not a very thick book, considering its age and the kind and number of facts they must dig up or check week after week. For example, how would you go about finding the answer to: "How many people telephone or visit U. S. doctors every year?" or "Did Queen Wilhelmina and her grocer use the same entrance to the palace?"

Cordially,

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