To Our Readers

By ELIZABETH VALK LONG President

GOOD JOURNALISM tends to foster more thoughtful, knowledgeable citizens, but rarely can a publication go beyond informing its readers to actively involving them in the political process. This week -- and approximately once a month hereafter -- we offer a new feature intended to do just that. It is called TIME on Capitol Hill. It contains a brief rundown of the most important bills Congress has acted on during the previous month, followed by a personalized * chart that will enable each of our 4.2 million home subscribers to see how his or her Senators and Representatives voted on those bills.

Just as important, on the second page is a preview of significant upcoming legislation. Once readers have decided -- with the help of the reporting and analysis contained in the rest of the magazine -- how they feel about major issues of the day, we encourage them to express their views by filling out the postcards enclosed with the page and sending them to their elected representatives. "What we're doing," says senior editor Barrett Seaman, who is overseeing the project, "is closing the loop among ourselves, our readers and our government."

Easier said than done, of course. When we began this project 15 months ago, we discovered that the mind-boggling logistics of customizing voter information required intensive cooperation by staff members in our editorial, production, customer-service and business departments. With guidance from consumer marketing director Kenneth Godshall, assistant director Hala Makowska negotiated a contract with Congressional Quarterly Inc. to provide us with the voting data base. Production director Brian O'Leary and staff painstakingly coordinated the technical and printing efforts that allowed us to trace all our subscribers down to their block and postal route to identify their legislators and then ink-jet those specific records individually onto each of their magazines. Normally, such a procedure takes up to five weeks. We now have it down to 48 hours.

IN ANOTHER INNOVATION, LAST WEEK SAW the launch of our new on-line service, TIME Daily. A supplement to the computer version of the magazine that we put out each Sunday night through America Online, TIME Daily highlights each weekday's top national and international stories, shaped with the same telling detail and knowing perspective as stories in the magazine. With AOL's interactive bulletin boards, TIME Daily enables us, as does TIME on Capitol Hill, to keep subscribers up to date while providing them with a way to make their voices heard on the issues that matter to them.