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

What do you think? . . . Should we change the name of TIME'S business news department from "Business & Finance" to something more up-to-date like "U. S. at Work"?

Right now this section is trying to do a double job for you:

(1) Trying to give you a better idea of how American business is helping to win the war and make America a better place to live in;

(2) and trying to keep you posted well in advance on the changes war and the government are imposing on business.

To do this job Business & Finance, like every department of TIME, has its own staff of writers and researchers. This fall TIME'S Business staff consists of nine specialists working in New York. In addition, three men in the Washington office are kept busy full time covering business news from the capital, and quite a few of our correspondents in other cities were picked because of their special understanding of local business conditions.

This is a lot of staff for a department that shows up in TME each week with about ten columns of type, but almost half of all TIME'S more than a million copies a week go to business executives who may be basing important decisions on reports in TIME'S Business department. And that is just one of several reasons why we consider it doubly important that everything you read in Business should be straight and sound and foresighted.

The Business editor of TIME is John Davenport, who was for years a star writer on FORTUNE. On the staff are--La Rue Applegate, six years on the Business staff of the New York Times; Perry Githens, three years news editor of Business Week; Emeline Nollen, who used to be an ace FORTUNE researcher, and Penrose Scull, our widely-quoted transportation expert, who for ten years had his own world-wide freight-forwarding business.

The head researcher is Marion Rice, who used to write the commodity reports for Standard Statistics. Under her are Anne Powers, who was five years with Standard Statistics--and Julia Wilson and Elisabeth Brockway, both of whom had long experience as research experts in Wall Street.

In recent months this staff has documented for our Business section some of the most-important stories TIME has carried. They took the lead in highlighting the critical scrap shortage in steel and the critical manpower shortage in copper. They were first to detail the dramatic expansion of American aviation all over the world and the imminence of hourly flights from New York to London. They were among the first to point up the need of meat rationing and coffee rationing and the foolishness of sugar rationing; the end of the aluminum shortage, the approach of the lumber shortage, and the nonexistence of the wool shortage. They foresaw the nationwide crisis in small business and the Washington chaos in raw materials. And months ago they showed that by year's end manpower would emerge as "the one big barrier holding back the U.S. war effort."

The editors know there is plenty to criticise in American business, but they also believe that business is one field in which America has unquestionably outstripped the whole world. They haven't much patience with attempts to hold down production, whether those attempts are made by cartel-minded businessmen or by labor or by government itself. They are satisfied that American productive genius is going to provide the decisive margin which will enable our fighting men to win the war; and after the war (provided we can balk all the stupid attempts to hold down production in the interests of some favored group) they believe American business will contribute to a higher standard of living than anyone has ever dared imagine.

That means our Business editors expect to have quite a story to tell you these next few years. But they can't help wondering if such a story is adequately reflected by the old heading "Business & Finance."

Cordially

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