A Letter From The Publisher, Mar. 20, 1950

For new readers—and to refresh the memories of the rest of us—this is the first of a series of Letters on TIME'S kind of journalism, to appear occasionally in this space. Most of them will be based on TIME, The Story of an Experiment, written by the editors on the occasion of our 25th anniversary.

It costs about $1.50 a word to write TIME these days, and that includes editorial costs only—no paper, printing, distribution or other expenses. Why does it cost so much? In the past, news has been adequately transferred from mind to mind for far less than that.

The world...