$ 1.48 and the Woman at the Well

The editorial cost of TIME today (not counting paper, printing, distribution, etc.) is $1.48 a word. In 1923 many newspapers had an average editorial cost of a cent a word; their average is still well under a dime. TIME'S $1.48 is spent (sometimes in vain) in looking for significant facts that make the story "come alive"; in checking up on other news media, and on itself; in finding the event's right place in the procession of events.

Why all this elaborate and expensive effort? In times past, news has been adequately conveyed for far less than $1.48 a word. When the women met at the well it was enough if one of them said: "Piers is at it again." Everybody knew Piers. Everybody knew whether the statement meant that Piers was experimenting with a new crop called "turnips," or giving money to the poor, or lying drunk in a haystack. The news at the well was not only intelligible, it was adequate.

The world community of 1948 has a far more difficult news problem. Knowledge in the soth Century--while enormously greater than ever before--is very unevenly distributed. Specialists are not confined to the faculty of a university; they are found among members of the same household. Various publications address themselves to specialists: one speaks to the physicist, another to his wife (who can't do long division), another to their son who is absorbed in music, another to their neighbor whose consuming interest is politics. But all these individuals have to pull their weight in the same civilization.

On this common meeting ground stands 20th Century journalism's great responsibility. Journalism has to talk to the physicist, his wife, his musician son and his political neighbor all at once. In its way and its world, journalism has to do as good a job as the women chattering at the well.

Part of TIME'S $1.48 goes into a more or less clumsy effort to tell the reader what kind of guy Piers is, or why he tries to grow turnips or what are the chances that he'll set fire to the haystack and burn up his house, wife and children; in short, to tell, across the 20th Century community's backyards of specialization, complexity and confusion, what the news is, and to tell it in such a way that its hearer will take it in and be able to use it.

Use it how? To make money? To impress his acquaintances?

Possibly. But chiefly to help him think about and care about his world. People living today in the U.S. and other parts of the free world are engaged in a great historical experiment; they are faced with the challenge of establishing and extending the first democratic civilization. For them, news has a meaning that it did not have for plain people in the days of Pericles or Pitt. The decisions of the 20th Century rest with the people. To act, they have to know and to care.

Some information is more assimilable than other information. Facts, as Mark Twain noted, can be presented in such a way that they merely create "confusion of the mind and congestion of the ducts of thought." The reader's digestion of news will never be "effortless." TIME, however, tries to sift, sort, condense and explain the news by this simple standard: How much effort can an ordinarily educated and intelligent man or woman be expected to use in understanding this story? It's no use saying that 80 million Americans ought to have a thorough grasp of physics by this time next year. Whether they ought to or not, they won't. Until they do, the journalist who wants to communicate anything about physics must continue to explain certain rudiments in terms that readers will understand. A journalist who gives his reader simple but necessary background material departs from a practice which a great contemporary philosopher* has called "the tiresome pretense that writer and reader know more than they do."

The reader must be told the news event. Sometimes, that is enough; the event may be part of a series just as well known to him as it is to the editor. More often, the reader wants to know where and how the event fits. TIME aims to tell the man who came late to the ball game what the score is, who made the runs, and how the prospect looks. Nobody is on time for all the ball games.

* Harvard's Emeritus Professor William Ernest Hocking, in Freedom of the Press.

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