NEWS for us is many things, from an armed clash in the Himalayas to the quiet stirrings of a scientist's--or an artist's--mind. But one kind of TIME story is a particular favorite in our own office, and it may not be bragging too much to suggest that TIME invented the form. This is the preelection look of an American city, congressional district or state, in which in a brief space we look at two contenders deep in political combat, consider their personalities, quote their remarks, judge their style and assess their chances--all against a background of what currents of opinion are stirring among the voters. These stories, as our readers know, can be as terse and tight as a one-paragraph note, or as comprehensive as last week's cover story on the close race in Pennsylvania. For the amount of space they occupy, these political notes require a great deal of footwork and judgment by correspondents in the field. And they take considerable skill in the writing, to catch the peculiar significance and flavor that distinguish one campaign among thousands (no wonder that some of our top editors trained on doing these stories).

In recent weeks TIME'S NATION staff, under Senior Editor Champ Clark, has focused on races in Ohio, Colorado, Pennsylvania. New York, Hawaii, Oklahoma, Kansas, Connecticut and Massachusetts. This week we take another look at Nixon and Brown in California, at George Romney's race in Michigan, and at the battle between Wilson Wyatt and Thruston Morton in Kentucky. Through these reports we try to catch the variety and divergencies of a wide country. In Nebraska as well as in the South there are Dem ocrats careful not to identify themselves with Kennedy; in Michigan and New York, among other places, there are Republican candidates who hardly refer to their own party affiliation. Still, out of all this local individuality will come a House and Senate, and many governorships, plainly labeled Republican or Democratic; and after the campaign is examined in on-the-scene detail, it also becomes part of our job to find what common concerns agitate the entire nation. Washington Bureau Chief John Steele has been roving the country for weeks, hoping to detect an underlying national consensus, or lack of it, on major issues, and his reporting is reflected in our lead story this week. On another page, TIME in capsule form makes its own judgment on how each of the U.S. Senate races is going. Our collective neck is out in many places.

SENIOR Editor William Forbis, who edited this week's cover story on the headmaster at Andover, was heard to remark recently that editors have little trouble warding off all kinds of discreet pressure from ''big business and big politics,'' but he found it harder to fend off people--including a number of his own colleagues--who, without the least subtlety, were eager to get their own prep school mentioned in the cover story. A good many of their schools turn up in the story, and would have anyway.

Forbis himself went to public high school in Missoula, Mont. Robert Shnayerson, who wrote the story, went to twelve different schools, and has trouble recalling more than ten of them--ranging from several private schools in New York and New Jersey to one of the biggest high schools in New York City. Among TIME editors, the roll call includes men from St. Paul's, Lawrenceville, Andover and Kent as well as from high schools in Nebraska, Washington, Missouri, and the Franz Josef Realgymnasium in Vienna.

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