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

Recently quite a few readers have been asking why Foreign News has been moved up ahead of World Battlefronts in some of our recent issues, why TIME has to have two departments to tell the story of the world at war instead of just one--and what is the difference between the two departments.

These questions go straight to the heart of the whole newsmagazine idea, and the only way I can answer them is to hark back to the reason TIME was invented.

For the basic promise we have made you as a subscriber does not end with our obligation to report the dramatic, exciting news that spreads headlines across the week's newspapers. It goes much further than that --for we have also promised that after you have, read your copy of TIME you will be thoroughly and understandingly well-informed about the policies and decisions and changing conditions that may erupt into headlines next week or next month.

For example, we have promised to keep you posted (and have kept you posted) on such news stories as the rat-race in Spain and how Franco's stanchest supporters are getting set to run out on him . . . on the latest tricks of the U-boat packs that may mean rising losses on the Atlantic again ... on the nervous lootings of Britain's shipping magnates at the prospect of a big, permanent U.S. merchant fleet ... on the strength of Lord Louis Mountbatten's command in Southeast Asia and the signs that action over there cannot be far away . . . on the Nazis' growing peripheral headaches--in Finland, more restless every day--in Sweden, now openly defiant--in the Balkans, where the rising tide of rebellion is almost reaching the proportions of another front.

Foreign News is the department where battles incubate, strategies are born and tomorrow's history takes shape. Foreign News looks back into the past and forward into the future much further than World Battlefronts--to give you background and help you see the probable course of campaigns to come. Foreign News keeps you posted on the politics behind the fronts--and on the teeter-totter of Axis and Allied influence in the capitals of the world's neutrals.

World Battlefronts, on the other hand, aims to integrate each week's actual fighting--to piece together the isolated stories of land and sea battles, put them in perspective with other actions of the week and other fronts of this global war--so that they will make clear, connected, non-contradictory sense for you.

The daily press is so full of news about the rout in Russia and the drive in Italy and our smashing air raids in the Pacific that every TIME subscriber is almost sure to have a lot of disconnected information about the week's actual fighting when he picks up his copy of TIME. And so perhaps the most important job for the Foreign News editors is to keep this stirring news of battle from blinding our readers to important, underpublicized news that is growing quietly toward headline stature in other sectors.

Some weeks our subscribers ought to have this information as background before they read TIME'S World Battlefronts department--and those are the weeks when you will find Foreign News ahead of World Battlefronts in TIME.

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