A Letter From the Publisher

By Richard B. Thomas

TIME's design and format have steadily evolved to meet changing journalistic needs. New sections are created, obsolete ones dropped and innovations like the Notes pages added. In this issue, the Economy & Business section introduces a new format to be used occasionally, as the news dictates. Shorter than a full-scale cover treatment but longer and less bound by the week's events than a regular lead story, the Economy & Business Special Reports will treat large subjects with an introductory survey, followed by separate stories examining various themes. Explains Senior Editor Charles Alexander, who oversaw this week's Special Report on the auto industry: "This format makes a broad subject easier to comprehend and allows us to approach it from different perspectives."

The search for a new story treatment began last August, when Detroit Bureau Chief William Mitchell suggested a major story on the realignments at General Motors. The idea was well received, but the editors also wanted to discuss other aspects of the business: the success of Ford's new cars, for example, and Chrysler's latest strategies. Enter the Special Report, a two-page overview of the U.S. automobile market in 1986, followed by one-page stories on each of the Big Three. Mitchell provided the substance of the stories from Detroit by interviewing, among others, the chairmen of the three automakers. "I was struck," he says, "by how much American and Japanese executives really are talking the same language these days."

The new format required an innovative design. That was where Art Department Designer Johnny White and Picture Researcher Richard Boeth came in. For the past year the two have been working as a team to enliven the look of TIME's business coverage. "Business often has to revisit the same story, like the auto industry or the stock market," says White. "We have to discover new and dramatic ways to present stock images so that the reader will find them fresh." Adds Boeth: "Wherever possible, we try to get business leaders out from behind their desks and into a context that reflects what his or her company does, or tells us something about the person. We want the picture to illustrate the whole story." For this week's Special Report debut, White and Boeth devised new layouts combining photos, symbols and charts, and came up with new caption designs. At TIME, as elsewhere, form most often follows function.