THERE are all sorts of ways to cover an election. Television does it by computer and instant commentary. The daily papers blanket their pages with countless, often overlapping stories on the results. TIME has a different mission. Because we are a weekly newsmagazine, we have a few days of which to stand back, sort out and organize the avalanche of facts, form fresh judgments, and render reasoned analysis.

TIME'S coverage of last week's mid-term elections has been in preparation for many months, of course. Our correspondents have been on the campaign trail from the start. Editors, writers and researchers supplemented the reportage by conducting numerous interviews in New York. Indeed, two of the fresh new faces on this week's cover have been familiar to our staff for some time. California's John Tunney dropped by last April for 90 minutes of coffee and conversation, while New York's James Buckley was quizzed on his views during lunch in early August.

Like most Americans, the 16 men and women in TIME'S Nation department sat up into the small hours of Tuesday night, following the returns and formulating first plans for the section they would put together. By the time they assembled at the office on Wednesday morning, a News Service team had organized correspondents' overnight reports into a 27-page outline of the election results. Senior Editor Jason McManus then gave the week's assignments to a group of colleagues whose backgrounds are almost as varied as those of the winning candidates.

Laurence Barrett, a onetime political reporter on the New York Herald Tribune, wrote the major story, viewing the election as a whole. Al Marlens, former managing editor of Newsday, did the personality profiles of Senators-Elect Tunney, Stevenson, Buckley and Brock, while B.J. Phillips, who used to work for the Washington Post, was responsible for the piece on six new Congressmen. Other articles were contributed by Ed Magnuson, who spent ten years on the Minneapolis Tribune before joining TIME; Keith Johnson, another political veteran of the Herald Tribune, as well as TIME'S Los Angeles and Washington bureaus; and William Barnes, who broke into journalism covering politics for the White Plains Reporter Dispatch. The section has been greatly assisted throughout the campaign by the expertise of Hays Gorey, a 5 1/2-year veteran of our Washington bureau, who came up for a writing stint in New York. Among his stories have been the Oct. 26 cover story on the Senate races, and in this week's issue the speech that Richard Nixon will never deliver.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.