A Letter From the Publisher

By Robert L. Miller

For Deputy Chief of Correspondents Jack E. White, it was a gratifying -- and unsettling -- week. Usually, White, who took up his present duties this past June, spends his time supervising the 51 correspondents in the magazine's ten domestic bureaus across the country. This week he had a special concern. White was the driving force behind our reports on the deteriorating conditions faced by inner-city blacks on the 20th anniversary of the riots that tore apart ghettos from Detroit to Newark. "The inner cities burned during that long, hot summer," says White. "But the conditions that sparked the turmoil, rather than improving, have got worse. I'm glad we did these stories, but I'm sorry we had to."

Born in North Carolina, White wanted to be a journalist as long as he can remember. Since he started as a reporter with the Washington Post in 1967, he has practiced his craft with a mission in mind: "I've spent most of my career writing about what it means to be black in America, trying to translate that for a wider audience." Joining TIME in 1972, he worked first as a writer in New York, then as a correspondent in Atlanta and Boston. In 1976 White won a Nieman Fellowship and went to Harvard to study ethnic politics and sociology in preparation for a stint as head of the Nairobi bureau from 1980 to 1982. On his return to the U.S., he covered the 1984 presidential campaign then went to Chicago as bureau chief the following year.

White has helped engineer a fresh approach to TIME's coverage of stories that require intensive reporting and analysis: deploying teams of correspondents with special expertise, then giving them plenty of time to comb through the complexities of their subject. This week's glimpse into the volatile inner cities was just such a project. White's team consisted of New York-based Correspondent Thomas McCarroll, who provided a gripping profile of a black family in Newark; Los Angeles Correspondent Jon D. Hull, who described a harrowing murder committed by a youth-gang member in Los Angeles; and Washington Correspondent Anne Constable, who talked to government officials as well as scholars and civil rights leaders.

"The more time we spent with the people of the inner cities," says White, "the deeper the understanding we hoped to get. This was not the sort of story you wanted to do up against a tight deadline." The extra time and effort, we think readers will agree, were worth it.