THE biggest feature in this week's TIME is our cover story and eight color pages on Mayor Daley's Chicago. It is a good example of how our kind of journalism works. Sometimes we hear outsiders talk as if one of our correspondents simply sends in a story, as a newspaperman would, which some anonymous They in our New York headquarters touches up. changes and distorts to his prejudices and tastes. That isn't how we work at all. The Daley story illustrates just how we do go about it.

Our Chicago bureau and our New York editors--who visit Chicago often --agreed long ago that changing Chicago deserved cover treatment, and that the mayor--and not a businessman, a civic leader or an educator--was the best man to tell the story around. There ensued a long series of wired exchanges on how best to illustrate the look of the city, and which editors, entertainers, clergymen or socialites should be photographed in color to give the flavor and savor of Chicago.

Then came another series of interchanges between Chicago Bureau Chief Murray Gart. Nation Editor Champ Clark and Writer Jesse Birnbaum. The bureau chief has a good idea of what the story's theme should be: after all, he is on the scene. Writer and editor in New York have a lot of questions they would like to hear the answers to--the dialogue is two-way. Bureau Chief Gart assigns his staff to cover various aspects of the story, and takes on a good bit of the reporting himself. The color pictures have been selected and captioned.

Finally the massive bureau file--broken into 14 takes--moves over the wires to Manhattan. It is long and thorough, full of thousands of facts from dozens of interviews, but it is not a story as a newspaperman would send it. We call it research, though it is not as deadening as that word suggests: if careful in its facts, it is casual and carefree in the telling. The Chicago bureau is anxious not only to report the facts but to suggest a tone and mood.

In New York, Writer Birnbaum has been reading up on the city, and refreshing his own recollections of it. A New Yorker himself, he once worked in our Chicago bureau for a year and a half, hated the city at first, but came to share its exuberance, admire its "spirit of cultural innovation," and find refreshing its "happy cynicism about crime." He was helped in his reading and researching by Joanne Funger. who made her first "casual visit" to Chicago in 1950 and has averaged about eight visits a year there since.

From all the mountainous massing of material, it was Birnbaum's job to sort out and compress, to find anecdotes or facts that in a brief compass would suggest the complexity of the city and the character of his subject. And so, when this week he wrote his 22nd cover story, the story for the first time became a fully shaped article. He was not merely changing, reordering or touching up someone else's version. And as Researcher Funger double-checked his facts and figures before publication, Chicago Bureau Chief Gart was in New York helping with the final copy, suggesting a modification here or providing further documentation there.

This whole process used to be called "group journalism," but all of us around here--whether writers, correspondents or editors--are individualists enough never to have much liked that phrase. At any rate, it is an intricate collaborative process, in which each does his part, the part that he does best.

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