WITH this issue, TIME'S readers will find a new category on the magazine's masthead. For many years, a sizable part of TIME'S editorial staff has been identified as RESEARCHERS. Their duties have gradually outgrown that title, and henceforth those staffers will be known as REPORTER-RESEARCHERS. Among them a number with particular experience and responsibility are listed as Senior Staff. -

These changes serve to describe more fully and precisely a range of talents that are essential to TIME'S form of journalism--and have developed since the first issue went to press in 1923. When TIME started out, the research staff consisted of a single puzzled but mightily determined young woman, who clipped newspaper articles and mined whatever information she could from a bookshelf that held a dictionary, a thesaurus, an almanac and a world history book. As TIME'S research efforts became more sophisticated, so did the girls--and their titles. At first they were titled "secretarial assistants"--but known less formally as "checkers." Eventually, TIME'S founders, Henry Luce and Briton

Hadden, decided that .they were "researchers."

As a breed, they were a phenomenon from the start. Within TIME. they swiftly established themselves as experts whom, as Luce once put it, "levitous writers cajole in vain and managing editors learn humbly to appease." Before long the TIME research system was emulated by communication firms, the arts, government and industry.

Today, as the task of organizing and analyzing the world's news grows ever more complex, TIME could not function without its reporter-researchers. Each week they help shape and then send some 400 queries to correspondents and stringers round the world. In search of background information, they spend long hours culling the extensive resources of the magazine's editorial reference library. As always, an important part of their job is checking for accuracy--in TIME'S stories and in others. When Richard Nixon remarked, after the November election, that the Republicans had held 14 governorships in 1960, Nation's Anne Constable made her own study of the records and found that the actual G.O.P. tally was 16, not 14.

As their new titles indicate, TIME'S reporter-researchers are by no means bound to the book stacks. Manhattan's corporate enclaves are as much the beat of Business section staffers ; they are of any newsman. Nancy Jalet's familiarity with Wall Street as instrumental in convincing the editors that the Dreyfus Fund's Howard Stein was the man to feature in our cover story on the securities industry; similarly, Sue Raffety, whose special area is advertising, noticed that Madison Avenue seemed to be harping on one theme, "getting it all together," and put that together for story, "All Together Now."

In other sections, too, TIME'S Manhattan-based staffers quite often supply expert and extensive reportage for their assigned sections. Virginia Adams, who has been writing in the Behavior section, produced a report for a cover story on Harlem that set te entire mood and direction of the articke. Sydnor Vanderschmidt traveled to Cape Kennedy to witness the Apollo 9 launch and will do so again for Apollo 14. While studying the nature of religious experience, Clare Mead underwent a consciousness-expanding experiment at Manhattan's Foundation for Mind Research; her report became a feature in TIME'S Religion section. Dorothea Bourne has interviewed cover subjects on location in such varied places as Edinburgh (Rudolf Bing), Chicago's South Side (Louis Armstrong) and Washington (Mamie Eisenhower), Other times, a staffer--even in World -has had to travel no farther than rosstown for the kind of story that is a function of TIME. Nancy Chase fas the first person from any major U.S. publication to interview representatives of the rebellious Algerian 'F.L.N. when they came to New York i 1955 to promote their cause at the U.N.

"Being a TIME researcher has never been particularly easy," says Chief of Reporter-Researchers Marylois Vega, "and the job gets more demanding every day. But you have a ringside seat on the world news, andyou are constantly learning something new and fascinating."

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