To answer some of the questions our subscribers have been asking about how TIME gathers, verifies, writes, and distributes its news.
Way back in 1935 TIME was the first U.S. magazine to open a news bureau on the Pacific Coast (in San Francisco—headed by David W. Hulburd, now Chief of all our correspondents at home and abroad). A year later TIME opened a second Western editorial office in Los Angeles. And now we are:
> Opening a new editorial office in Seattle. . . .
> Starting still another new news bureau in Denver. . . .
> Enlarging our California staff to a total of nine.
TIME long ago recognized the tremendous and growing importance of the West and resolved, so to speak, that it would itself "go West and grow up with the country." So for years we have been calling national attention to all kinds of news unfolding in the West—from Upton Sinclair and Harry Bridges to Henry Kaiser, from Ham-and-Eggs and Hetch-Hetchy to Bonneville Dam. And percentagewise we now have more readers on the Coast than any other front-rank magazine.
In one sense the new offices we are now opening signal our continuing and increasing interest in the West. But they also typify the way we are building up our staff all over the country—and so this might be a good week to tell you briefly the "why" of our nine domestic news bureaus—and of the TIME reporters who are also on the job for you now in more than 100 other U.S. cities.
None of these newsmen is there to duplicate the news coverage that flashes into our editorial offices 24 hours a day over our Associated Press wires—or the day-to-day news that crowds the pages of the 89 U.S. and 11 Canadian newspapers our editors, writers and researchers read carefully for you every day.
Rather their special job is to keep our editors well-informed on the hundreds of important things that go on under the surface and too often are not considered "news" at all—shifts in public opinion, currents in politics, trends in agriculture, expansions in industry, developments in science and the arts, the rise of new leaders who may soon be national figures — so that we in turn can keep you well-informed, not just about "the news of the week," but about what is really going on in every section of the country.
Right now there is a special reason for opening up new listening posts around the nation and expanding our coverage of behind-the-scenes U. S. news. That reason is to get a head start on next year's election, to help you know what businessmen and farmers and workingmen everywhere are talking and arguing about as the country swings into a critical Presidential campaign.
Getting this kind of news calls for reporters with a particularly close and intimate knowledge of their territories and their people. Two such men are Henry Hough and Paul O'Neil.