The Balance of Hours

That is the Newsmagazine's job. TIME'S subtitle contains another important word--Weekly. That is what gives TIME the hours it needs to present the news with sense-making background. That the news in TIME reaches the reader later than newspapers or radio might bring it is an obvious disadvantage to him. Only if its presentation of news is better than the newspaper reports (i.e., sharper in detail, keener in insight, easier to read, understand and remember), can TIME overcome the disadvantage of being "late." When the advantage outweighs the disadvantage, TIME has a value; when it doesn't, TIME hasn't. That is the challenge that forces TIME'S staff to work under an hour-by-hour pressure quite as severe as the newspapers.

Nearly all TIME'S correspondents and most of its writers and editors are former newspapermen. They are the same men (plus or minus a few pounds) who used to do their 2,000 words a day (or maybe an hour) and not be ashamed of the result. The newsmagazine idea sets up tougher professional standards, and the extra hours afford a chance to meet those standards.

John Osborne, chief of TIME'S London Bureau, tells how TIME coverage differs from ordinary reporting:

"Generally speaking, a newspaper or radio reporter (leaving aside columnists and commentators) is concerned with reporting the single event. When Ernest Bevin proposed a Western European Union, the first and main job of the daily correspondents was to report what he said as quickly and accurately as possible. We had three days. We could assume that TIME'S editors knew what Bevin had said; our main job was to tell them what we and others thought it meant, what he did not say, etc. We had to supply clear, unbroken quotes of his key remarks. The whole of the debate was also revealing, and largely overlooked by the daily press. That was why we gave more cable space to this supplementary coverage than to Bevin himself. Trends that had been building up for months surfaced in this debate; to report Bevin in context we had to report those trends."

"In other words, Bevin's speech and the debate it precipitated could be inclusively reported only by reflecting a whole year's events and trends--a job that the daily press, by & large, does not undertake, and which TIME must undertake, whether it finally succeeds or not."

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