By BRUCE HALLETT PRESIDENT

NEWS HAS A DISQUIETING HABIT of finding TIME's Johanna McGeary. In March 1981 she was one of the first reporters on the scene after Ronald Reagan was shot in Washington, a block away from where she had been lunching. In January 1994 she filed extensively on Los Angeles' Northridge earthquake, after the house at which she had been staying during a one-day travel stopover was rocked. And then, two weeks ago, she found herself in Jerusalem the day Yitzhak Rabin was killed.

McGeary, freshly promoted to senior foreign correspondent, had just landed in Israel to fill in for Jerusalem bureau chief Lisa Beyer (who is on maternity leave) and to develop in-depth stories about the region. She was having dinner on Saturday night when a friend's cell phone rang with news that hadn't yet hit the TV: the Prime Minister had been shot. McGeary, who had known Rabin professionally for many years, rushed to the TIME bureau and, with Beyer and four stringers, banged out the 15 pages of breaking coverage and analysis that appeared in TIME two days later.

But if the news follows McGeary, McGeary also follows the news--farther than most journalists. After reporting for TIME from Boston and at the White House, she became the magazine's first female State Department correspondent. In that capacity she not only displayed what assistant managing editor Joelle Attinger calls "one of the most astute, penetrating foreign-policy minds I've encountered," she also collected so many visas that she needed a 24-page passport extension. Some of the visits were quick diplomatic stops, but many were extended stays. "There are very few countries I haven't been to at least once," she says. "You can't cover foreign affairs by watching television; you have to feel it and smell it and talk to people."

Following a tour as Jerusalem bureau chief, McGeary worked in New York City from 1988 to 1995, editing the World section and letting her visa collection languish. That should soon change. Her new mandate, says executive editor Jose Ferrer, is as a "writer-analyst-reporter," parachuting in on big stories, anticipating news in longer researched pieces and writing foreign-affairs analysis out of New York. The New York layovers will be brief and infrequent if McGeary has her way. "Reporting has always been the soul of journalism," she says, "the thing I've loved the best. To be there and to see it; to be, for better or worse, an eyewitness to history."