A Letter From The Publisher, Dec. 4, 1944

To answer some of the questions subscribers all over the world have been asking about how TIME gathers, verifies, writes and distributes its news.

There are a lot of new names among TIME’S editors and writers over there in the next column—and perhaps you will read their stories in TIME with a more personal interest if you know something about them.

Take the new naval expert on our Battlefronts staff, for example. He is the author of two important books—The War at Sea (“a masterly work” said The Nation) and America’s Navy in World War II (The New Republic’s reviewer called it “as fine a piece of current history as I have ever read”). No armchair admiral, he knows sea warfare firsthand—steamed up to Jap-held Vella Lavella to help rescue the cruiser Helena’s survivors after the Battle of Kula Gulf — was one of the first five white men to reach Munda airport (he got there 24 hours before our troops marched in) —and in the first raid on Marcus Island he saw three new fighting tools first tested in battle: the Essex class carrier, the Independence type carrier, and the sensational Grumman Hellcat.

Another new Battlefronts writer (who worked 11 years for the Associated Press) began following the battle for Europe long before Munich—went through the bombing of Barcelona and the Spanish War, was bombed again in Brussels in 1940, got out of Belgium just a jump ahead of the Nazis, then worked for months in occupied Paris and collaborating Vichy (“I began to feel like a Jonah”). Two years ago he was awarded a Nieman Fellowship in journalism at Harvard, and five years before that the National Headliners Club gave him a gold plaque for the best spot news coverage of the year for his eyewitness story of the Hindenburg disaster at Lakehurst.

A new writer in Foreign News was blitzed twice in the Battle of Britain, once in London, where a land mine exploded only 75 feet away — again in the Good Friday raid on Coventry. At home and abroad he was 13 years on the staff of the New York Times, and perhaps you read his book on Gang Rule in New York, which the Times called “an eye-popping Only Yesterday of crime and politics in a flagrant era.”

The oldest of our new writers (he is 45) worked 15 years on Scripps-Howard newspapers, most recently editing war news for the Cleveland Press. … A new U.S. at War writer (also a Nieman Fellow) was our Seattle correspondent in 1937, left to take his bride on a pre-Hitler honeymoon that included almost every country in Europe, later worked as assistant city editor on the Seattle Times and as Army correspondent for Collier’s in seven western states. . . . And still another new writer was head of our Detroit News Bureau, a job he prepared for by 12 years’ work on the Milwaukee Sentinel, the Detroit Mirror, and the Detroit Times (in his spare time recently he turned out a mystery story that won cheers from the critics).

I wish I had the space to sketch the backgrounds of some of the other editors and writers who have joined us in recent months. But perhaps these examples will serve to show you the kind of newsmen we are trying to add to TIME’S staff in these days when it is so much harder to gather the news and make sure it all adds up to a true picture of world events.

Cordially,