Died. TIME'S delightful but confusing habit of listing names, ages, claims to fame and other interesting tidbits about the famous newly deceased in its Milestones notices; then the circumstances of, and places where, the deaths occurred; of apparent good sentence structure; in New York.
"THAT perceptive paragraph is nearlly the full text of a letter that we got last week from Betsy Tremont, a U.S. Government employee in Teheran. Reader Tremont had spotted a change in the style of our Milestones section. Since the section appeared in the first issue of TIME in 1923, each milestone has usually followed a form fairly described in the reader's letter. In the Sept. 29 issue, we changed the general style. Now a milestone takes a less restricted form, is more like a little story. Reader Tremont doesn't like the new style. "Is it too late to revive the old way?" she asked. Sorry, Betsy, but the editors feel that the new form makes it possible to tell the story more clearly and sharply.
This subtle—but in its way substantial—difference is a small reminder of how TIME changes. We have never had a crashing revision of format accompanied by fanfare. Yet, as anyone who looks at past copies of TIME will immediately recognize, the editors have changed the magazine gradually but dramatically over the years. In this issue there are two changes in editorial presentation that the reader will first notice when he glances at the index.
We have dropped our Show Business section and are inaugurating a section under the heading Television. TIME started a Radio section in 1938, changed it to Radio & TV in 1948, when there were only 172,000 television sets in the country, then made it TV & Radio in 1956, when the number of U.S. sets had reached 37.6 million. In August 1958, perceiving that a new amalgam had developed, in which personalities in television, theater, movies and other areas of entertainment were moving in a kind of interchangeable pattern, we started a Show Business section. Now, with television reaching a point at which it is best dealt with as a separate subject, the editors intend to use the new section to examine all as pects of its pervasive influence—both good and bad. At the same time, we plan to expand our Cinema, Theater and Music sections to handle stories that might earlier have appeared in Show Business.
The other change that readers will note this week is the way we deal with business. In its early years, TIME had a section called Finance, which later became Business & Finance, and then simply Business. In 1962, when economic development in both Europe and Asia had given international business a new importance, we decided to establish a separate section on World Business. In the five fast years since then, the global cross-fertilization of ideas, dollars and goods has proceeded so rapidly that nearly every business story has some international aspect. As a result of this big change in the nature of the subject, the editors decided that it is no longer appropriate to segregate World Business. Beginning with this issue, we have a Business section with the combined space of the previous U.S. Business and World Business sections; it will contain stories that originate both in the U.S. and abroad and will give us new flexibility in analyzing business developments everywhere.