From the Publisher

By Elizabeth P. Valk

Among aspiring writers and reporters, an internship at TIME is prized as one of the best summer jobs in journalism. Each year hundreds of college juniors at 40 participating schools compete for a chance to spend nine weeks in the Time & Life Building watching how we practice our editorial skills and trying their hands at big-time journalism. "It's an incredible opportunity," says Minal Hajratwala, a communication major at Stanford University whose reporting on stories about plagiarism, Protestant superchurches and the resignation of Stanford President Donald Kennedy earned her three bylines in the magazine.

But as even the most casual readers of the financial press know, there is more going on at Time Warner than reporting and writing, and this year a larger group of graduate and undergraduate students were invited as summer interns to learn about the business side of magazine publishing. "It was an exciting time to be here," says David Geithner, an M.B.A. candidate at the J.L. Kellogg Graduate School of Management who put his experience in investment banking to work analyzing the effectiveness of our advertising rates in today's uncertain economic climate.

Alan Miles, a Harvard M.B.A. student who interned in the circulation department, was surprised by how many reports he had to turn out. "This is a very memo-driven company," he observed. Columbia graduate student Sallie Binnie, who regularly put in 11-hour days in our business office, did not expect the pace to be quite so hectic. "I kept waiting for that three-martini lunch," she says. "But it never showed up."

Things kept hopping for the editorial interns as well. In his first week as a reporter-researcher, Amherst's Bryant Rousseau called a factory near Prague to get some weapon prices and tracked a British arms expert to his home in Upton-upon-Severn. Ronald Amstutz, a photography major at the Rochester Institute of Technology, was made responsible for illustrating the World Notes page and spent much of the summer scrambling to gather pictures from around the globe. One of his final duties: assigning a photographer, picking a site and getting his fellow interns to Brooklyn for the picture that appears on this page.