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

There are a lot of new names among TIME'S editors over there in the next column--and perhaps you would read the stories they write for TIME with a more personal interest if you knew something about them.

Some of these newsmen come to us with quite impressive records in the special fields they have been reporting.

For example, one of the newest writers in our Army and Navy department was for five years aviation editor of the Associated Press--for four years President of the Aviation Writers Association--has been in and out of practically all the big U.S. plane plants and training fields. He is a licensed pilot--and has flown more than 150,000 miles on assignment--to Alaska and Europe and all around the rim of South America. Probably he brings to his job a wider background knowledge of aviation--both in the flying field and the factory--than any writer in the country.

Another was in charge of music writing at the National Broadcasting Company for eight years--was one of Walter Damrosch's closest associates. He wrote the music section of the Book of Knowledge and authored several distinguished books on music appreciation in his own right. His "Approach to Music" was described by Critic Leonard Liebling as "definitely the most understandable and useful thing of its kind."

A recent addition to TIME'S team of Business writers was for five years news editor of Business Week, played a major part in developing its original editorial plan--and has contributed regularly to the Saturday Evening Post and the Reader's Digest for many years. . . . TIME'S Science and Medicine departments now draw on the wide knowledge and experience of a journalist who for years was head of the chemistry and physics departments at one of the best known State universities in the country--who was Director of Science and Education at the World's Fair--who edited a famous six-volume textbook series on the sciences.

Another of our new writers (who speaks six languages and was educated in four countries) was a foreign correspondent for the Associated Press and special writer for the Bureau of Agricultural Economics in Washington before he came to TIME. And still another was with LIFE for five years, interviewed all the 1940 presidential candidates for TIME'S sister publication, worked on some of LIFE'S most famous feature stories, including those on the Windsors, Juan Trippe, Eugene Grace, etc.

I wish I had space to sketch the background of some of the other editors who have started to write for TIME in the past few months, but these will serve as examples of the kind of men and women TIME continues to attract.

The anonymity of TIME'S group journalism often makes it hard for you to know just who writes what (even TIME'S Managing Editor sometimes can't tell). But I hope you feel that the end product of their work as it appears in TIME shows they are reporters who can think with authority in their chosen fields--and interpret that authority in cogent, succinct newswriting.

Cordially,

P.S. I think I ought to add that about half of TIME'S present editors came to work for us very soon after they graduated from college--some as long as 19 years ago. We are really quite proud of the number of writers we develop right here in our editorial offices, and one of these weeks I will tell you something about them.

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