To answer some of the questions our subscribers have been asking about how TIME gathers, verifies, writes and distributes its news.
Some people seem to think TIME'S treatment and interpretation of various stories in the news is thought out and ordered in the sanctum of some Editorialissimo (see left and take your pick), that thereupon all vice presidents, managing and senior editors and other executives snap into line, and that teams of writers and researchers then proceed—with a precision that would make the Radio City Music Hall Rockettes look like an awkward squad—to produce that exact story down to the last semicolon. In short, put idea in slot, pull lever and zing—next thing you know a million copies are all over every place.
There are just three things wrong with that lovely idea: 1) it doesn't work that way; 2) it was never intended to work that way; 3) if it did work that way there wouldn't be any such thing as TIME, because neither you nor anybody else would read it.
Actually, the editorial department of TIME bears less resemblance to a precision dance team than it does to an old-fashioned town meeting when somebody is trying to raise the tax rate. Far from marching in close order drill, the editorial department has, in miniature, most of the virtues—and most of the defects—of Democracy at Work. TIME'S stories are born amid all sorts of discussion and argument about the facts and their meaning—and before they go to press late Monday night there has been more than one sharp conflict and too often an exploded temper. By that time the managing editor's tie is usually around his ear, his hair is in his eyes, he is lighting one cigaret from another and vaguely wishing that he had majored in a dead language when he was in college. For there is no one among all the names at the left who is not entitled to be heard on from one to a dozen stories in the issue.
Couldn't we make this process a little easier on the nervous system? We might—but then we wouldn't be TIME. For every issue of TIME contains uncountable thousands of facts, big, little and intermediate, and of the utmost variety and complexity. One query about one fact may produce three answers, all different, and somehow these must be reconciled. So, not because we're a particularly quarrelsome bunch but because facts will not fit into goosestepping patterns, there are on almost any story clashes and contradictions, some major, some minor, which have to be resolved before it goes to press. They can be resolved only by discussion and counter-discussion in which the managing editor, one or more senior editors, the chief of research, and the writer and researcher who have done the actual spadework on the story are all involved. The only managerial technique that could stand such a strain is a technique that relies not on rigidity but on the utmost flexibility.