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

It is a very sobering thing for our editors to read on this week's cover that more than a million U.S. families are now turning to TIME each week for a clearer understanding.

In all the history of publishing only one other magazine has ever reached even 300,000 circulation--at $5.00 a year--and it certainly would have cheered TIME'S founders as they watched TIME'S first copies slowly peeling off a little flat bed press back in 1923 if they had had any assurance that TIME'S circulation would ever reach even 100,000.

For 100,000 was the magic figure then--the circulation at which TIME might hope to make enough money to stay in business--and it looked very, very far away. In fact, it seemed so far away that every established publisher TIME'S young founders could get in to see (from Cyrus H.K. Curtis down) threw cold water on their "newsmagazine" idea and refused to put even a dollar into it.

Luckily TIME'S early readers were much less bearish. For instance, within a month of the first issue, Charter Subscriber Thomas W. Lamont told his friends that TIME was "a brilliant feat." Colonel House said the infant magazine "filled a long-felt need." Bernard M. Baruch proclaimed TIME "the best condensation I have seen."

And Franklin Delano Roosevelt, then just the Squire of Hyde Park, said in a particularly encouraging letter: "I feel certain TIME will grow in popularity. It is interesting all the way through and unbiased as far as it is possible for red-blooded Americans to make it so." Mr. Roosevelt closed with a friendly suggestion that we ought to try to get the nation's newsstands to handle it (as late as 1929 TIME'S newsstand sale was only 35,000; this week it will probably top 300,000).

But still there was good reason on the doubters' side; for the magazine TIME'S founders planned was not a magazine for everybody--and it never will be a magazine for everybody. As you know, there are more facts per paragraph in TIME--more significant, difficult, complicated facts about industry and finance and politics and war--than there are in any other widely read magazine we know about. And no reader can really get full value out of TIME unless he brings to TIME a background of education far above average.

And so, long after the early red ink years from 1923 to 1926--even after Mr. Roosevelt moved from Hyde Park to the White House in 1933--it looked as though 500,000 would be timberline for TIME.

Of course one explanation of why TIME has grown so far beyond our expectations is that there are three times as many high-school and college graduates today as in 1923. Another reason is that America's income is much more widely distributed today and there are a great many more homes which can afford TIME. And of course the need for TIME has grown too--for the news has become increasingly important in all our personal lives, and increasingly difficult to follow without the organized, verified kind of reporting that TIME offers.

But whatever the explanation, I don't want to pass this milestone without telling you how much we all appreciate the confidence and support you have given us. And we know it is no light thing that so large a percentage of the most important people in America are turning to TIME each week for help in understanding the news of today and the promise of tomorrow.

Cordially,

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