Dear Time-Reader

On Pages 36 and 38 of this issue you will find a new department, The Hemisphere, which henceforth will contain the news of Canada and Latin America.*

When World War II drew the destinies of the countries of the Western Hemisphere closer together than they had ever been, the news of Canada and Latin America was placed in separate major departments in TIME in order to call our readers' attention to its growing significance. Now the editors have decided to combine Canada and Latin America into a single new department, the better to report the news of their increasingly collective actions. In the last ten years, for instance, trade between Canada and Latin America has increased 1,000%. Whereas Canada's trade with Latin America was one-half of 1% of her total foreign commerce before the war, by 1946 it had jumped to 5.1%, and it is still growing. At present, Canada's largest single overseas investment is in Brazil.

The advent of Hemisphere has been preceded during the last few years by a gradual reorganization and strengthening of TIME'S network of reporters in Canada and Latin America. With one exception (The New York Times), TIME was the first U.S. publication to maintain a regular news bureau in Canada and in Latin America. At present we have three news bureaus in Canada --in Ottawa, Montreal and Toronto-- each headed by a bureau chief, and 24 local correspondents (called "string correspondents" or "stringers") in as many cities scattered throughout the Dominion. Each is a reporter or editor for a local newspaper like the Winnipeg (Manitoba) Tribune, the Halifax (Nova Scotia) Herald, or the Yellowknife (Northwest Territories) Blade. During the last six months the news file from Canada ran to more than a million words.

Latin America also has three news bureaus -- in Mexico City, Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires -- a full-time roving correspondent, and 12 stringers strategically placed from Puerto Rico to Chile. Their job, of course, is to watch for news stories of more than local interest, cover special assignments for TIME'S editors, answer their queries, and keep them filled in on what people in their sections are doing, saying and thinking. This they do to the extent of some 200,000 words a month.

From now on the three writers and three researchers of the Canada section will join forces with their opposite numbers of the Latin America section to turn out The Hemisphere under Senior Editor Francis Brown, a veteran of 15 years with the New York Times. Brown, who makes frequent news-gathering trips to both Latin America and Canada, was decorated recently by the Government of Chile for his journalistic contributions to hemispheric unity.

From this coalition of writers, researchers and editors, backed up by the news coverage described above, will come, TIME'S editors believe, a weekly report on Canadian and Latin American news which should be more penetrating and informative than ever before.

Cordially yours,

James A. Linen

* Those of you who have read TIME for, say, ten years or so are accustomed to seeing departments come and go, or change, as the accent on the news changed. You will recall, for instance, that in the May 1, 1939 issue TIME'S editors 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 week the German Wehrmacht invaded Poland Background gave way to another new department, 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 department for all of the events which would then be strictly world news.

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