TIME, as you know, is written and edited in the TIME & LIFE Building in Rockefeller Center, New York City. That does not mean that TIME is edited in an "Ivory Tower"--as some people have suggested. TIME reaches out into the hamlets and byways of America, and some of you have been kind enough to write in and wonder how we do it.

Since Pearl Harbor this letter has followed the news spotlight overseas; we have told you much about our battlefront and foreign affairs coverage, and about the correspondents responsible for it. Now, after four long years away, the spotlight has shifted to U.S. affairs--to the problems of returning G.I.s, the acute shortage of housing, the steel strikes, and the many other phases of current industrial strife. The world is watching to see how the U.S. handles these problems, and TIME is fully prepared to cover them--from the national, not the Ivory Tower, point of view.

Besides the full domestic (and foreign) news service of the Associated Press, TIME has a heavy-duty pipe line into Washington, the nation's and the world's greatest news capital. In Washington we have a bureau staffed with 14 full-time correspondents and 31 assistants. Other major U.S. news centers are similarly covered: we have 19 full-time correspondents (and scores of backers-up) in ten more news bureaus in Boston, Atlanta, Chicago, Detroit, Denver, San Antonio, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle--and New York City.

To plug the gaps in this national network, TIME'S Domestic News Bureau has part-time--but no less important--correspondents strategically located in 79 cities across the U.S. Their job is not only to watch for news stories of more than local interest, but to keep us constantly filled in on what people in their sections are doing, saying, thinking. And you may be sure that these correspondents never fail to jack us up when we get off the beam; they are, in fact, our quickest, toughest critics.

When General Motors and Big Steel are struck, or the President turns up unexpectedly in Missouri, or "Pappy" Boyington takes a wife, our own correspondents are there to give us the extra details of those events--from the local point of view. The reports from all these correspondents, and the editorial guidance that they send us, add up to TIME'S national point of view.

TIME recognized the need for this kind of local-national coverage in 1929 when we hired our first full-time out -of -town correspondent -- David Hulburd, who is now chief of TIME'S Domestic News Bureau--and sent him to Chicago to open our first news bureau. He also was in charge of our first Pacific Coast bureau (at San Francisco), which got under way in 1935.

It was that first Pacific Coast bureau that got us started on the job of telling you what a huge industrial development the Coast was headed for. Our on-the-spot correspondents sensed it, and repeatedly told our skyscraper editors about it. After a while we found ourselves in the happy position of having predicted--in the course of covering the news--exactly what was taking place.

As an example of the kind of guidance reports we get from our correspondents, let me quote from a recent dispatch from Sidney James, West Coast bureau chief:

"As of this week, Angelenos were never more optimistic about the future of Southern California. . . . Last month the total investment in new plants and expansion of plants announced, begun, or indicated in building permits, was $26,639,000. This amount exceeds any similar investment in any entire year from 1921 through 1940. . . ."

It is this sort of information, multiplied by bureaus and correspondents, that has helped us to maintain a national viewpoint and to make sense out of the Truman Administration, the Army-Navy merger, and the new developments in Science, Medicine, Art, Music, et al., that you want to know about.

Cordially,

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