A Letter from the Publisher

By Richard B. Thomas

Reporting the news is rarely a Monday-through-Friday job, and TIME often goes to extraordinary lengths to cover late-breaking events. By any standard, however, last weekend's Reagan-Gorbachev meeting in Reykjavik posed a challenge. It was a big story, of course, big enough for TIME to send eight reporters and five photographers to Iceland. The meeting, moreover, was set to conclude early Sunday afternoon, well past the hour that TIME's presses normally start to roll.

Printing deadlines can be set back, and they were. But to ensure that the magazine reached its readers with the smallest possible delay, all aspects of the process, which normally takes most of the week, had to be compressed into less than a day. To handle the abundance of late reporting transmitted from Iceland, where clocks are four hours later, writers and editors assigned to the story in New York City began their work before dawn on Sunday.

One of the weekend's toughest tasks was to get color photos back to New York City quickly. The solution: a state-of-the-art relay system that converts images into computer digits and sends them via satellite. "This allows us to get pictures of Sunday events and still ship the magazine to readers at or near the usual delivery time," explains TIME Corporate Production Director Bob McCoach. To transmit the photos, Britain's Crosfield Electronics, maker of the complex system, rounded up the sophisticated and bulky equipment and shipped it by air from London to Reykjavik.

At TIME's Manhattan headquarters, the data were changed back into pictures at our high-tech facility known as IMPACT, for Image Processing and Color Transmission, where the magazine's stories and illustrations are assembled into pages each week. IMPACT then beamed the late-closing pages to TIME's U.S. and overseas printing plants. "Because the pages dealing with Reykjavik were held past deadline, we had to arrange special late crews at all ten U.S. plants," said Corporate Operations Manager Elaine Fry. "Extra delivery trucks were dispatched in some cities to rush the issue to the newsstands."

Despite the extreme time pressure, Fry was delighted by the opportunity that the Reykjavik story gave IMPACT to show its mettle. After all, she says, "the whole purpose of IMPACT is to reduce the time it takes to get news from the writer's desk to the readers." A Sunday-morning presidential meeting in Iceland was a special test, but that goal is one that TIME pursues each week of the year.

Richard B. Thomas