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These two by-products of TIME might well have swamped Editor-Publisher Luce had he not, soon after Hadden's death, deputized the business management to Roy E. Larsen, TIME'S first circulation manager.* To free himself, when necessary, from routine editorial duties, he also created the post of managing editor and gave it to John S. Martin, a contributing editor of TIME'S first issue. Later, the various TIME Inc. publications were made autonomous and given publishers to look after their individual affairs. Two former managing editors of FORTUNE, Ralph McA.
Ingersoll and Eric Hodgins, became respectively the publishers of TIME and FORTUNE; Roy E. Larsen became publisher of LIFE. For himself Luce still cherishes, as he and Brit Hadden did from the beginning, no title or occupation more than that of Editor of TIME.
How It Works, The difference between the editorial mechanisms which produced the first and the 782nd issues of TIME is the difference between a minipiano and a grand piano. It has many more keys but it is still the same kind of machine.
Before starting a week TIME now gives its staff a two-day rest, during which a backlog of news is allowed to pile up. The week proper begins with long hours of conferences in which writers, researchers, and various specialists, in successive groups of three to 15, examine, weigh, discuss news developments with the managing editors. Requests for more information and verification of facts are wired, telephoned, cabled. Meantime, an immense volume of news—20,000 words an hour—continues to gush in. New conferences are held, old decisions revised, new research begun, stories written, torn apart, rewritten.
¶ It is called group journalism.
¶ As the week wears on, a rumble like distant thunder comes from three soundproofed rooms where nine teletype machines (automatic typewriters) keep up a never-ending thump, thump, thump. Seven machines supply the incoming raw material: press dispatches from A.P. & U.P., telegrams from TIME correspondents.
Two machines send out the finished product: copy to TIME'S printers in Chicago.† Thump, thump, thump, a telegraph machine starts printing on a continuous roll of paper: PASADENA, CALIF. TIME PTY ANSWER YOUR QUERY EBENEZER SMITH'S MIDDLE NAME NOT MAITLAND BUT MORTIMER.
Five minutes later the Music researcher is in the teletype room with a memorandum for the printers. "MUSIC MUST CORRECTION. PICKLED PIG'S FEET. PARA 3, SENTENCE BEGINNING ONE DAY WHEN HE WAS STILL A STEVEDORE, CHANGE EBENEZER MAITLAND SMITH TO EBENEZER MORTIMER SMITH."