To answer some of the questions our subscribers have been asking about how TIME gathers, verifies, writes and distributes its news.

To help our armed forces in the South Pacific keep in closer touch with the news from home, TIME has just begun publishing a special edition half the world away in Australia for the U.S. Army Post Exchanges there. Copies will also get through to the American outposts on the islands of the South Pacific, to be given away by the Army morale branch (Special Services) to the troops on Guadalcanal, at Buna-Gona, and on the fighting front before Lae and Salamaua. And more copies will be made available to the Navy for the Marines and for the sailors of the task force fleets.

We have been working on this Australian edition ever since last May, when we got a cable from one of our correspondents in Australia, Robert Sherrod. "The soldiers out here are probably the news-hungriest mob in history," he said. "A seven weeks old copy of TIME just arrived in camp and has been dog-eared to ribbons. Repeatedly, officers and enlisted men have stormed at me almost angrily, 'Why can't we get TIME over here while the news is still fresh?' I believe news from home is more important to morale now than cigarets, and sometimes food. The boys don't just want to know what is going on in Congress. They want the feel of home. And there is nothing they would rather have than TIME."

Since then hardly a day has gone by without our getting a letter from some subscriber, relaying word from a boy in the armed forces asking us to fly copies of TIME to him overseas. And from Guadalcanal last October Editor John Hersey sent word that "One of the first things anybody asks out here is why they can't get TIME. Certainly the best thing that could happen for these soldiers would be some surefire way of getting the news to them quickly."

Of course space on the trans-Pacific transport planes is always so precious that we could not even consider asking the Army to fly thousands of copies of TIME across 7,000 miles of ocean each week; but within a few hours after Sherrod's cable arrived we flashed back word to him to sound out the possibility of printing a special edition of TIME in Australia for General MacArthur's men.

He found everybody enthusiastic about the plan. He also found, however, that there were so many details to work out in so many places that it took almost nine months to get everything running smoothly. But by last September we were able to start flying photographic negatives of TIME'S pages to a printer in Sydney, who printed up a few experimental copies each week for groups of news-starved men in hospitals and for others on duty in isolated areas. And last month we got into full scale production.

Regularly now, two duplicate three-pound packages of film are highballed 9,935 airline miles across this country and over the Pacific. These packages go on separate planes by separate routes to assure the safe delivery of at least one of them -- and each little package is wrapped in special orange and black stripes so there will be no danger of its being overlooked at one of the island air bases and missing the next plane.

Flying-time from San Francisco to Australia is so fast these days that eventually we hope our American soldiers down under will all be reading their copies of TIME while that same issue is still on the newsstands here at home.

P.S. Sorry, we can't take individual subscriptions for this edition.

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