To Our Readers

With the right conjunction of happenstance, fortune and, perhaps, the stars, Time can react to the week's news around the world with as many as 11 different covers. We have the capacity to tailor each regional edition to the needs of its readers.

Fortunately, such multifacetedness is rarely called upon. Nevertheless, the U.S., European, Asian, Australian, Canadian and Latin American editions often have different cover stories each week. And all of them create much of their own content.

We've exercised this flexibility for a couple of decades now, but our ability to target our audiences' interests increased substantially after 1996, the year we decentralized our international editorial operations and appointed Christopher Redman and Donald Morrison, two longtime veterans of TIME, as regional editors in London and Hong Kong. This week we are proud to announce the first cycle of successions in this successful enterprise. Redman, editor of TIME Europe, is returning to shoe-leather journalism as an editor-at-large based in London, stepping back into the world of what he calls "real" journalism reporting and writing stories rather than shepherding other people's prose into print." Not that Redman has had an unexciting tenure. During the past few weeks alone, he has directed coverage of the fall of Slobodan Milosevic and the crisis in the Middle East.

Redman will be succeeded not by one person but two: Don Morrison and his wife Ann. Don, who was Chris' counterpart at our Asian edition, and Ann, editor of our sister publication Asiaweek, have been in Hong Kong for six-and-a-half years now, and in a couple of months would have qualified for permanent residency in Hong Kong. Since 1996, the Morrisons and their respective magazines have overseen some of the most historic developments on the continent, including the handover of Hong Kong to China, the Asian financial crisis and the fall of Suharto. Says Ann, who came to Time from Fortune magazine: "What will I miss least? Press controls in many of our major markets." "We've lived in Europe before," says Don, "so it holds no terrors for us except the prospect of explaining European monetary union."
Norman Pearlstine, Editor-in-Chief


, Managing Editor