From the Publisher

By Louis A. Weil III

Each issue of TIME is really two magazines. The magazine you read is the one made up of stories prepared by the editors from reporting around the world. The other magazine -- the one you leaf through while looking for the stories -- consists of paid ads. To maintain editorial integrity, the two are created independently by separate staffs working on different floors. Neither the ! journalists nor the advertising staff knows precisely what the others are doing, until the managing editor, executive editors and sales management all review the nearly finished product late in the week.

But the two parts have to combine seamlessly into one magazine, and that is where Charlotte Quiggle and Tony Strianse come in. They are the weekly working contact point between our editorial and business staffs. It is their job to plan the sequence of editorial and advertising pages to make one smoothly readable magazine -- a high-pressure juggling act of dizzying complexity. Not only do the news stories change from one hour to the next, but so do the ads. In order to allow advertisers to reach readers more selectively, TIME is now published in more than 200 different U.S. editions and more than 100 international editions, each with its own geographic and demographic target audience and its own mix of ads.

Strianse starts the process by preparing a mock-up of the magazine that shows the tentative placement of each ad page. Meanwhile, Quiggle is given the editorial requirements for that week's issue. Then she and Strianse work the puzzle, trying to fulfill both the editors' needs and the advertisers' requests. As a proof for each page becomes available, it is pasted into position in a "dummy" version of the magazine, allowing the makeup mavens to see at a glance how ad and edit go together.

Often they don't. It's amazing how frequently the content of ads and the stories scheduled to appear next to them threaten to conflict or to evoke unintended responses from readers. Quiggle and Strianse have become expert at avoiding the juxtaposition of, say, an air-disaster story and an airline ad. They know that liquor ads do not keep easy company with stories on religious fundamentalists. When a conflict arises, the ad is usually moved. But sometimes things slip through. Both Quiggle and Strianse are still talking about the week they allowed an advertisement for pen-and-pencil sets to appear on the same page as an interview with Mother Teresa under the headline "A Pencil in the Hand of God."