A Letter From The Publisher, Sep. 24, 1951

As part of a continuing program to get to know young men training for journalism and to help them learn about us, a traveling classroom is now being prepared which will show what kind of magazine TIME is and what it stands for, against the background of the history of American journalism. This chance to know our operations more intimately will be offered to some 10,000 students in schools and departments of journalism at 70 or more universities and colleges.

In a trial run of the project this summer, a former TIME writer, Allan B. Ecker, 30, lectured on the newsmagazine at 15 schools of journalism. His 4½ years with TIME had included periods as writer in the Education and Press sections. He discussed the special techniques of our type of magazine, its feeling about news and about the background of news, truth and legend which has marked its relatively short history.

Ecker brought back from his summer tour a report of avid interest in what he had to say about the practices and philosophy of newsgathering at every campus he visited. Questions were searching and analytical, and the students seemed to be seeking practical answers to what is new in journalism and why it is better or worse than what it has replaced. They weren’t interested in drafting lofty codes of a New Journalism.

At every session, TIME was the subject of huge curiosity, as well as the object of admiration and some tough criticism.

(A WAVE at the Great Lakes Naval Training Center wanted to know how TIME reports the news of Russia, one of the world’s biggest areas, without a Moscow correspondent. Answer: the best way we can, with our Russian Desk reading the lines and between the lines of Russian periodicals, with diplomatic contacts in our Washington bureau and abroad, and with trickles of information which seep through the Iron Curtain.)

TIME’S covers aroused as much interest as anything else, with most criticism coming from those who thought (erroneously) that the editors necessarily confer an honor when they select a cover subject. They objected to such covers as Stalin, Costello and Eugene Dennis. Cover subjects are not picked by popularity contests, they were told, but by careful evaluation of their influence on the news, good or bad.

Students expressed amazement at the voluminous files of research contrasted with the brevity of stories as they appeared in print. After reading 29 pages on the Cicero race riot story, whittled to 3½ columns in the magazine, a University of Nebraska student said: “All this is so interesting—why didn’t you use the whole thing?” Ecker likened the TIME story to an iceberg, with the small portion seen on the surface supported by the great bulk underneath. With a whole world to cover each week, TIME would quickly overburden its readers by reporting every detail of every story.

Amazed at the fistful of crumpled pages which represented one writer’s false starts on a cover story, salvaged from a wastebasket, Syracuse University’s Dean of Journalism counted them carefully. There were 138.

These students can bring many important qualities to their profession as they move into the practice of journalism. Largely upon this new blood depends the development of continually higher standards of news coverage everywhere. Significantly, a great many plan to work in their home states — in small towns and rural areas where their training can be put immediately to good use.

This year’s crop seems to have a real awareness of “the geography of news,” springing partly from war-born familiarity with distant places, partly from the presence of foreign exchange students. This consciousness that “news is where it happens” can bring a sense of balance and perspective to U.S. journalism —which too often in the past has focused too much on the big cities and the world’s glamor spots.

Cordially yours,