For nine years the whole world (pop. 2,134,000,000), with brief exceptions here and there, has been in a Great Depression. At some point in these bitter years, the post-War world became a pre-War world--that is, a world anticipating World War. Millions and millions of young men, in the U.S. as elsewhere, had a War marked fatalistically on their private calendars. . . .

With these words TIME, in its May 1, 1939 issue, introduced a new, occasional department, Background For War, dedicated to the proposition that world war was close at hand and that you would understand it better if we reviewed the events which led up to it. The most immediate violent reaction to this new department came from Nazi Germany, which banned TIME for what it considered keeps.

Background For War ran its course through the turbulent spring and summer of 1939 and, excepting one later installment, gave way to another new department called World War the week the Wehrmacht invaded Poland. (This drew the wrath of many of you for presuming, you said, to call it a world war.) As the war progressed we added Army & Navy and World Battlefronts, changed National Affairs to U.S. at War, dropped World War and, when the end was in sight, introduced International as the correct repository for news of the peace to come, of UNO, and of all the events which would now be strictly world news.

Thus, as the accent on the news changed, TIME changed with it, in order to tidy it up for you and keep it in its logical departments. This conscious functionalism in shaping the week's news is uniquely important to TIME. In fact, it began with TIME.

Until TIME came along journalism had developed, in about 150 years, from pure commercialism (ship news, market reports, etc.) and personal political pamphleteering to a heterogeneous recording--interspersed with mighty "crusades"--of generally unrelated and unexplained events. A business man, say, could find the sports section intact, but he had to read every item in his daily paper to make sure that he hadn't missed something of significance to him. TIME proposed to change that. Its original prospectus said:

". . . TIME collects all available information on all subjects of importance and general interest. The essence of all this information is reduced to approximately 100 short articles. . . . Each . . . will be found in its logical place in the magazine, according to a fixed method of arrangement which constitutes a complete organization of the news. . . ."

This "fixed method of arrangement" turned out to be 22 departments (16 of them are still in TIME), from National Affairs to Books, in a slim 28-page volume (at present TIME has 23 departments and 104 pages). But it was the beginning of the functional journalism of information. Foreign news went where it belonged, under Foreign News; the news of Art, Religion, Medicine, etc. was similarly departmentalized. And departments which needed it were further organized internally with permanent subheads like National Affairs, The Presidency, The Congress, The Administration, etc.

Under this scheme of organizing the news logically and conveniently many a department has disappeared or been absorbed by another after serving its purpose. Thus Transport became part of Business & Finance, and Crime subsided into National Affairs. World's Fairs folded when the need for it ended, and Animals dispersed to the departments (Science, National Affairs, etc.) they made news in.

With all the comings & goings of other departments to meet changing times, TIME's basic departments have remained to stand the test of 23 years of reading as a distinctive, original, logical method of presenting the week's news. We think it is the best news design yet produced to implement our original, expressed desire: to make the news make sense.

Cordially,

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