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

"Time was when TIME would be opined

Unsuited for the female mind.

But now the scene is quite reversed:

She cops it and she cops it first."

TIME has been voted the first choice magazine of so many influential groups of men for so many years that it may surprise you to hear that actually TIME is read by just as many women as men--in fact, by about 10,000 more women.

Departments like U.S. at War, World Battlefronts, Foreign News, Science and Business have a few more men readers; departments like Medicine, Cinema and Theater, Books, Education, Art, Music and Religion have a slightly greater following among women.

And year after year TIME seems to play a more important part in the community activities of its women readers. Last winter 2,973 women's clubs made TIME the basis for their current event studies and forum discussions ; and so great is their interest that we have had to organize a special Club Bureau under Florence Williams to cooperate with them. When we first started the Bureau we wondered whether its staff of one would have enough to do. Now the Bureau sends out an average of 452 letters or specially-asked-for services a day--and Miss Williams needs a secretary and four assistants to give America's clubs all the help they ask.

In the beginning she just answered individual calls for cooperation and advice, but as the trend of the requests became clearer, she organized regular services to take care of the most frequent ones. For example, she now gets up a discussion outline every fortnight in collaboration with America's No. 1 expert in current events discussion, Professor Lyman Bryson of Columbia. She supplies monthly and semi-annual news quizzes, special enlargements of TIME maps for platform use and several other services tailored to club needs. In some of our most active clubs she gives a prize each year to the winner of the Current Affairs Contest.

Her mail is a sort of daily report on how seriously America's club women are taking their job of keeping posted on the difficult, personally important news of these critical times. One typical day last week her mail brought (among many others) calls for TIME clips on the interdependence of the United States and her Pan-American neighbors . . . post-war reconstruction . . . the importance of a unified Army and Navy command . . . recent developments in plastics and synthetics.

Miss Williams and her assistants wish they could accept all the bids they get to spend vacations with club officers everywhere from Maine to Southern California--and just after Pearl Harbor a chairman of the Missouri Women's Clubs jokingly invited the Club Bureau's entire staff to share their bomb shelter in Marvel Cave. In fact, the national offices of most of the women's clubs have given the Bureau so much personal advice and practical encouragement that by now Miss Williams is not sure always whether her procedures grew out of her own thinking or the clubs' suggesting. But either way I can't deny that we all get a great kick out of finding that a "man's magazine" like TIME is playing such a major part in the activities of the country's women's clubs.

If any of our subscribers would like Miss Williams' help on the current events programs of their clubs, I know she would be delighted to work with you. And this goes for men's clubs too--more than 1,100 of which based their current events discussions on TIME last year.

Cordially,

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