EVERY magazine, to some extent, -- chooses its own readers--by the assumptions it must make about the range of interests its readers share. We naturally make a few assumptions about TIME readers: that they are interested in what's new, that they are eager to be well informed, that their time is valuable, that their curiosity is broad and extends to the frivolous as well as the serious, and that they will work to understand what matters--in all fields.

We also constantly have to make assumptions throughout each issue about how much the reader already knows about any event or subject. These days, when so many words fill the air, when car radios repeat the news hourly on the hour and TV commentators rehash what the camera has already shown, we see no point in repeating the banal rituals of the communiques. Sometimes, as in this week's cover story, the most significant part of the news may have escaped readers too busy to wade through columns of testimony in those newspapers which gave the subject much attention.

On stories already covered to saturation, we look not just for a few more details of color but for the why of the story. We try to add insight and interpretation to the familiar, and to separate out the essentials of complicated issues--and then to move on to matters that have gone underreported or ignored elsewhere.

In the beginning, TIME was something of a digest. Now our bill for our own reporting, here and abroad, runs to more than $5,000,000 a year, a sum matched by no other magazine. Basic to our operation is our writing, editing and research staff in New York, where the magazine is produced each week. The heart of our method is a constant interchange of ideas between editor, writer and correspondent, a process necessary to anticipate the shape and content of stories, assemble the facts and form the judgments. In the fields of music, art, literature and entertainment, we do not summarize the criticisms of others but provide our own. In art, believing that the picture is the thing, we are the only magazine to run art color pages every week in the year.

In business, we once tried to make everything interesting to the housewife who might have just a casual interest in business; we now aim for a more sophisticated reader--the person who already knows about business and wants to read something more than what is to be found on the financial pages. This led us, about a year ago, to add a new section called World Business, which has explored the little-known world of influential and dynamic business figures abroad and the foreign trends that have increased bearing on U.S. living.

Finally, at the end of our critical departments, comes Books, which has its own free charter, and feels no need to review every machine-made bestseller, but can roam publishing's byways, selecting from huge historical works that will never reach a wide audience the newest evidence or appraisal of past events, or seeking out literary merit wherever it may be found, in the unknowns or even among the successes.

These are some of the ways we provide the essential ingredient of any good magazine: its editorial uniqueness. It seems to work: our circulation has never been higher. We now sell 3,625,000 copies a week, including our five editions in English abroad. Our circulation has increased 200,000 in the past year, and our newsstand sales, which are one favorite measurement of a magazine's vitality, are up 19% over a year ago--and 1962 was a big year for us too.

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