A Letter From the Publisher

By Robert L. Miller

When the phone rang at 7:30 a.m. last Thursday in TIME Photographer Robin Moyer's Seoul hotel room, he thought it was a routine wake-up call. "Have you heard about what's going on in the Philippines?" asked Assistant Picture Editor Julia Richer, phoning from New York City. "My day got worse from then on," says Moyer. For the next 24 hours he and Richer coordinated the successful effort to give TIME readers the most up-to-date pictures to illustrate this week's WORLD story on the attempted coup against the government of Philippine President Corazon Aquino.

Moyer was in Seoul to set up procedures for using TIME's new state-of-the- art photograph-transmission center there. He and Richer had regularly joined forces to choose pictures during last year's People Power revolution, which ousted Dictator Ferdinand Marcos and made Aquino President. "I trust his judgment," Richer says.

Their teamwork paid off again last week. Even while the shooting continued in the streets of Manila, batches of film from a three-man team of photographers were being flown to Seoul, about four hours away. After telephone discussions with Richer, Moyer and TIME Photographer Ed Kim selected the photos that most dramatically illustrated what was happening in the Philippine capital. Then in a photo lab in downtown Seoul, Moyer, Kim and a team of technicians began the high-tech wizardry of transmitting the color photos to New York City.

In a procedure that TIME has increasingly used as part of its coverage of late-breaking news around the world, each picture was first converted into millions of computer digits, and that information was stored on tape. Then it was beamed via satellite to the TIME Impact (for Image Processing and Color Transmission) Center in New York City. There Seth Zeitlin, one of six systems managers, received the data on tape and entered the information into TIME's computer system. Finally a high-resolution picture was printed, and Richer could see the photo that Moyer and Kim had selected less than an hour before in Seoul.

To TIME Picture Editor Arnold Drapkin, the Manila-Seoul-New York triangle demonstrates TIME's long-standing commitment to bringing its readers the most striking and timely photographs possible. It also points up the versatility of today's photojournalists, who must be experts in technology as well as outstanding photographers. "The best photo in the world is no good if it is still in somebody's camera," says Drapkin.