CONTRIBUTORS

RICHARD ZOGLIN primed himself for writing this week's cover story by immersing himself in news media: tabloids, broadsheets, news radio, talk radio, broadcast TV, cable TV, the Internet. Then, last Monday, he tried an experiment: from 7 a.m. until after midnight he did nothing but watch, read and listen to news, everywhere he could find it, about the presidential debate. "It was mind boggling. By the end of the day, my head was spinning," says Zoglin, a veteran press and TV critic whose 10 previous TIME cover subjects include David Letterman, Diane Sawyer and Bill Cosby. He also wrote about CNN for the 1992 Ted Turner Man of the Year cover. "We're being deluged with news as never before," says Zoglin. "But I'm not at all sure we're better informed."

FARAI CHIDEYA, 27, comes to TIME by way of MTV News and CNN, where she has become one of America's youngest and best-known talking heads, doing Generation X political analysis for Generation X viewers. A graduate of Harvard and a former reporter at Newsweek, Chideya hates the Gen X label but is resigned to using it "with a smirk in my voice." For this week's cover package, she tries to explain her generation's seeming lack of interest in current events. "It's not as if there's no base of knowledge," she says of her peers. "There's a different base of knowledge. The challenge is to create--or recreate--a common language for the political and social issues of our time."

FRANK GIBNEY, TIME's new Tokyo bureau chief, is an old Asia hand. Not only has he worked in the Far East for 11 years (most recently as head of TIME's Hanoi bureau), but his father Frank Gibney Sr. headed the same TIME Tokyo bureau in the late '40s and early '50s, when he reported on the first stirrings of Japan's postwar economic rebirth. This week Gibney follows in his father's journalistic footsteps, watching Japan climb out of economic doldrums and prepare for a critical election. This is a time of unusual ferment in the normally staid nation, says Gibney. "The story isn't so much about next week's election as it is about a country in search of a future."

DAN KADLEC, TIME's newest columnist, spent a decade covering Wall Street as a reporter, editor and columnist for USA Today (with a year off to edit the ill-fated St. Louis Sun newspaper and obsess over his beloved Cardinals). Kadlec's Money in Motion column will mix financial advice with stories about the personalities of today's Wall Street, which he describes as somewhat kinder and gentler than in the greed-filled '80s yet "still plenty exciting with the push to be global and America's renewed interest in mutual funds." This week he offers a skeptic's take on the stock market as it continues its record-setting bull run. "Don't be blindsided," he suggests bearishly. "The market keeps on chugging, but it has to disappoint a lot of people at some point."