A Letter From the Managing Editor

By Henry Muller

TIME is a weekly newsmagazine, aimed to serve the modern necessity of keeping people well informed. TIME is interested not in how much it includes between its covers but in how much it gets off its pages into the minds of its readers.

Henry Luce and Briton Hadden

Prospectus for TIME, 1922

We have never found any way to improve on that statement of TIME's basic mission. what changes, as the world changes, is how TIME best fulfills the ambitions of its founders. thus for 65 years the magazine has evolved, both in its appearance and in its content, always with the same goal: to better serve the needs of busy, curious, intelligent readers.

This week we mark one more step in that evolution. in recent months, you may have noticed, we have been experimenting with new ways to organize our stories and present them on our pages. we are now applying a number of these approaches throughout the magazine. we're also adding some new sections.

On the next page you'll find a larger Index, designed to let you know promptly what is in the magazine every week. the new Interview section will probe some of the personalities who influence the course of history and thought. American Ideas will bring you closer to people who are not household names but who do make a difference. Critics' Choice will present a convenient and more complete summary of our reviewers' judgments. the expanded People section is, well, just more fun. in all of this, our aim is to find new ways to offer you more information, more quickly and more clearly.

In making these improvements, we have been guided by one principle that does not change: TIME is above all a newsmagazine. as Luce and Hadden understood from the beginning, news is much more than what appears on the front page. a president's decision is, of course, news, as is an earthquake or a coup in a distant land. but news is also an advance in medicine, a success (or a failure) in business, a controversy over a movie. News is an environmental trend, a cultural happening, a book that tells a story never told before, an idea seldom so well expressed.

In a world saturated with information -- from radio, television, newspapers, specialized magazines -- TIME's responsibility more than ever is to deliver understanding beyond the sound bites and headlines: incisive reporting, thoughtful analysis, distinguished writing, compelling photography. that's why we have introduced some new voices in TIME, along with a broader spectrum of points of view.

These changes are part of our effort to transmute information into knowledge, reflecting the full range of the joy and agony and struggle and triumph of life itself. it is still 1988, but i think we are in fact well on our way to a magazine for the 1990s, a vital print companion to the electronic age. we invite you along into an exciting future.