A Letter From the Publisher

By Robert L. Miller

A strand of pearls clings to her red TIME T shirt and beads of perspiration moisten her brow, but the figure crouched behind home plate is meticulous and imperturbable. Even on the diamond as catcher for TIME's softball team, Chief of Research Betty Satterwhite Sutter exudes the calm presence that she carries through hectic workdays. "I've been playing softball since I was eleven," says Satterwhite, who once won the team's most-improved-player award. "It helps me feel young. Besides, the camaraderie on our team, with people you work and play with, carries over into the office and helps me get through the rough times." Like her catching duties, Satterwhite's schedule requires her to monitor all the bases, dashing from one editorial meeting to another in the course of assigning 69 reporter-researchers to stories and projects each week. Their job: to gather documentation for virtually every fact that appears in the magazine and to provide reporting and background material for the writers. Through her staff of reporter-researchers, Satterwhite, who became the magazine's eighth research chief in 1984, is the ultimate steward of TIME's accuracy. She is outspokenly proud of her staff's contribution to the magazine. "There is no question," she says, "that research provides a richer lode for our writers to mine and enhance their stories. Fortunately, our reporter-researchers have a voracious appetite for news, are sticklers for detail and love books and libraries, which is where they spend a lot of their time." She adds, "We pride ourselves on our pursuit of accuracy, down to the smallest detail, and our aim is to help make TIME more readable."

Brought up in Texas, Satterwhite came to the magazine staff in 1976 after ten years at Time Inc.'s editorial library and a year in Paris doing research for a book. By November of that year, she had become the head researcher in the Nation section, where for eight years she was immersed in the news and in managerial challenges as well, adapting the section's routine to events each week. Nowadays, when she is not gently cajoling or encouraging her staff, Satterwhite spends her free moments working on the economic theories and equations she is studying for her M.B.A. at New York University. But however full her days, she approaches each week with characteristic civility. And she always manages to set aside a few hours each summer Tuesday for softball.