This is a special announcement to the 1,400,000 women who read TIME every week. Men may read it, or not, as they please (see cut).

Beginning Jan. 2, you will find on your radios a news program, TIME FOR WOMEN, written and edited each day by TIME. The American Broadcasting Company will broadcast it five afternoons a week, Monday through Friday, coast-to-coast, at 4:30 E.S.T. It will give you the news, as it comes to TIME every day, and the personalities who make it.

By no means the least feature of this new program is its commentator, Shelley Mydans. With her husband, LIFE Photographer Carl Mydans, she has covered most of the warfronts of the world for TIME & LIFE. As a result, she has seen more of the world in the last six years than almost any other woman journalist.

Shelley Mydans' father, Everett Wallace Smith, was a newspaperman who became professor of journalism at Stanford University. Her mother wrote, too. According to Shelley, she invariably went to sleep to the sound of typewriters. She left Stanford in her senior year to go to Broadway to become a dancer and an actress. She became, instead a LIFE researcher and, in 1938, married her favorite photographer.

They went abroad together for the first time in the fall of 1939 as the German Wehrmacht was slicing up Poland. Shelley worked in Sweden while her husband photographed the misbegotten Russo-Finnish war. She was in Portugal on the "balcony of Europe" when France fell. Eight months later she was in China, finding and setting up stories for her husband, placating unwilling camera subjects, dodging Japanese bombs and shellfire, writing her own copy. They got to Burma and Singapore ahead of the Japs, taking pictures and writing stories. Then they went to Manila--in October, 1941.

They were still there when Manila fell. They were interned in Santo Tomas prison. Shelley describes what followed as 21 months of "constant, oozing fear." She became a monitor of the women's room, a member of the sanitation committee, one of the detail which picked the weevils out of the cereal. Eventually transferred to another internment camp in Shanghai, she was repatriated with her husband aboard the exchange ship Gripsholm, in December, 1943.

Shelley wrote a novel (The Open City) about her experiences, did some pieces for FORTUNE'S issue on Japan, and, late in 1944, went back to the Pacific. Her beat was Guam, Saipan, the Philippines--where she saw the Japanese surrender--and then, Japan.

Of all Shelley Mydans' admirers, none tops the hard-bitten G.I. editor of the Mid-pacifican, who wrote, on Dec. 2, 1944: "Shelley Smith Mydans, the Pacific's first gorgeous war correspondent, is here. . . . (She) cannot be summed up in a sentence, but a sentence can report that she's an able newspaperwoman who has been more places than a globetrotter, has had more adventures than a soldier of fortune, knows more about the Japs than most military commanders, and, at 29, is better to look at than 75% of the movie stars.

"I talked to Shelley Mydans for three hours the other day . . . and whether she's telling a joke, talking seriously, or relating adventures that would scare Superman, she's cool as a Tom Collins. . . . Shelley Mydans is one of the relatively few people on our side who knows much about our Pacific enemy."

That is a large order to live up to. But Shelley Mydans has earned the right to talk about the news. She will also bring you reports from TIME'S correspondents--a job that she is well equipped to do, having worked with almost everybody in TIME'S world-wide news-gathering organization. I hope you will listen to her, and I think you will like her.

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