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

Every word of this issue of TIME went to the printers with a penciled dot over it.

In fact, a pencil has dotted every one of the 30,000-odd words in every one of TIME'S weekly issues for more than 20 years now--and every dot means that a trained researcher (TIME now has 43) has checked the word for accuracy.

There is no other system quite as demanding as this in all the world of journalism--and subscribers often ask us how we find girls who can stand the gaff and shoulder the responsibility, and what kind of girls they are. So this week I thought I would introduce you to Content Peckham, one of the best researchers we've ever had.

Like almost all our researchers, she is a college graduate--Bryn Mawr, where she studied science and mathematics and planned to become an engineering architect. Like most of our researchers, she had editorial experience before she came to TIME--for during the depression she gave up her engineering plans and went to work first on a community magazine, later on a trade journal. Like most of our researchers, she speaks several foreign languages --French and German, with a smattering of Spanish. And perhaps most important of all, she had traveled to a good many of the world's news-centers, made four trips to Europe, visited England, France, Italy and Germany. In Berlin in 1930 she had her first chance to size up Hitler, whom the world was still refusing to take seriously--heard him harangue his followers--showed her news sense by predicting this wild-eyed, mustached little paperhanger would rule all Germany in three years.

Content Peckham came to TIME as a Science and Medicine researcher in 1934 (a job her Bryn Mawr background in the sciences helped her land). But when Hitler goose-stepped his troops into the Rhineland two years later and TIME started building up its Foreign News staff for the storm to come, her firsthand knowledge of Europe made her a logical research-candidate for this expanded department. She has been helping to keep TIME'S Foreign News straight ever since.

In the past seven years this assignment has twice taken her back to Europe's capitals--to London, Paris, Berlin, Rome, Prague and Vienna. She was in Germany during the frantic days just before Munich when the Czechs were mobilizing and France was calling up her reserves--crossed five miles of mined border into Holland en route to Britain -- there heard Chamberlain defend before the House of Commons his tragic effort "to keep peace in our time" while his countrymen were feverishly digging air raid shelters and experimenting with barrage balloons. That same year she visited Canada to meet the Dominion's key officials--and in 1940 she traveled to Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, Santiago, Lima and Quito getting acquainted with many important policymakers south of the Rio Grande.

With such a background, Content Peckham has outgrown her old post as a researcher. Last year she became an associate editor--and today her special and highly important job is to head up the 14 girls who check every word you read in World Battlefronts, Foreign News and Army & Navy.

Cordially,

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.