Not every American town has a factory or transit system or even so much as a semipro softball team, but there is hardly a hamlet in the U.S. without a newspaper. Thus, for those who choose to work as journalists, the chances are good of spending time on a small-town daily at some point. There is, for instance, Senior Writer Lance Morrow, who wrote this week's cover story on the great American migration from the big cities to smaller cities, rural areas and the Sunbelt. As a high school student, Morrow spent summers in Danville, Pa., covering fires, fairs and Elks club meetings for the Danville News, the local daily. In expansive moments, his editor would send him out around the county to research a farm story. Like many Americans today, Morrow feels that rural living offers a healthy contrast to big-city life. Some time ago, in fact, he left New York for a six-month sabbatical in Maryland and rural western Virginia, where he began work on a book. Yet, also like many Americans, Morrow discovered that his allegiance to country life was fragile. Says he: "I kept hitting the road up to Washington and New York --partly as an exercise in typewriter avoidance; partly because, as I admitted to myself, I am a city boy."

Not everyone who worked on the story would make that claim--or, some would say, that confession. A few years ago, for example, Chicago Correspondent Richard Woodbury, who reported on the move to the countryside in the Midwest, fled his native New York for the open skies of Colorado, where he worked on a small newspaper in the remote city of Grand Junction. Woodbury returns there frequently when Windy City life begins to pall. In the same spirit, Manhattan-based Reporter-Researcher Sarah Button regularly retreats to her family home, a farm in Delaware. For Reporter-Researchers Peggy Berman and Susanne Washburn, who also worked on the story, happiness is the hills of Vermont, where both have weekend retreats.

Every once in a while, we like to share with our readers news of awards that TIME stories have won. Recently, there have been four such awards. The Freedoms Foundation at Valley Forge presented one of its George Washington Honor Medals to Business Editor George Church for his July 14 cover story examining the question "Can Capitalism Survive?"; another medal was awarded for our special 1776 issue. Associate Editor Frederic Golden received the American Institute of Physics' science writing prize for his Sept. 1 cover on earthquakes. Our June 30 examination of crime, written by Associate Editors Jose M. Ferrer III and James Atwater and Staff Writer John Leo, received the New York State Bar Association's Media Award in the national magazine category.

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