Dear Time-Reader

We have just initiated a series of regional news conferences. I sat in on the first one last week in Atlanta. Twenty-four of the South's best journalists, who are also part-time correspondents for this magazine, talked news with each other and with 15 members of our New York staff, including six top editors. It was a shirt-sleeved session in which men and women who know their business pooled what they know, compared evidence on newsworthy trends in their area and worked on specific story ideas.

Larry Laybourne, General Manager of our U.S. and Canadian News Bureaus, decided to try out the regional conference system as a means of getting correspondents and editors together more often. As boss of correspondents, Laybourne gets these two groups together whenever possible--for working visits and at our general news conferences in New York. He likes the regional session because it brings together a smaller number of men to swap talk about news stories in a particular area.

Most of the correspondents around the table in Atlanta were men accustomed to making news decisions for some of the South's best newspapers. From North Carolina, for instance, came Jack Riley, recently Sunday editor of the Raleigh News and Observer and now journalism professor at the University of North Carolina; George McCoy, managing editor of the Asheville Citizen; Henry Coble, telegraph editor for the Greensboro News; and LeGette Blythe, onetime college pal of the late Thomas Wolfe and former Charlotte newspaperman. Blythe has just published his sixth book, a Biblical novel entitled Tear for Judas. He took time off from the convention to sign copies of it for Atlanta bookstores.

These Southerners have all spent years reporting specific problems of the South. Clark Porteous, our Memphis stringer and top reporter for the Press-Scimitar, is a New Orleans-born grandson of a Confederate artilleryman, a Nieman Fellow (1937) and author of Southwind Blows, a novel about a Mississippi lynching. "The book showed the horror of lynching," says Porteous, "but it also tried to show all the spokes of the wheel, to tell the complexity of the South's traditional problem." Porteous considers himself a part of "the South's new generation"; he is pleased, but far from satisfied, with the tremendous strides the South has made toward racial equality.

Another stringer who has become something of a specialist is Bill Abbott, who spent most of the past year digging into Florida crime and aiding the Kefauver Committee.

A stringer may be a state news editor (e.g., Warner Ogden of the Knoxville News-Sentinel) or farm editor (e.g., Jack Leland of Charleston's News & Courier). Whatever his specific job, each was intensely aware of the business and farm booms still accelerating in the South. All spoke of the rising standard of living for both Negroes and whites; the continuing switchover to diversified crops, the rise in beef raising on improved grasslands, the increase of tobacco poundage on limited acreage, the tobacco industry's efforts to sell abroad and the fast growth of chemical and textile manufacturing.

These and other Southern news developments have been followed by Bill Howland, our Atlanta Bureau Chief for the past eleven years. But, like the rest of us, he enjoyed the chance to talk them over with correspondents from the entire region. In short, Laybourne's regional news conferences help everybody. Next stop: Montreal, for a meeting with Canadian correspondents.

Cordially yours,

James A. Linen

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