PUNCTUATING the 646 acres of the New York World's Fair are eleven 60-ft.-high steel "Archways to Understanding," sponsored by General Foods Corp. to provide fairgoers with a continuous flow of news. For 14 hours of every day, a stream of information will flash across electronic panels mounted on the towers. The news will be supplied by the TIME-LIFE News Service.

A staff of eight writers and editors in the TIME-LIFE Building in midtown Manhattan, directed by Frank R. Shea, will be backed up by TIME-LIFE correspondents around the world, the Associated Press and other sources. The task of writing the news to fit the 42-character, five-line format is a new kind of test for the old craft of headline writing. Delivering it to the viewer is a newer technological problem.

When the staff has made all the news fit, the prepared copy is delivered to the Wire Room, from where operators transmit it by Teletype to the information-control office in the administration building at the fairgrounds. There the teletapes are fed into an electronic communications system in which world news and news of the fair are integrated with previously prepared tapes of General Foods commercials. The integrated tape is fed into a "reader," and this accomplished device flashes the words onto the eleven widely separated tower panels by electronic impulse. When the system was first tested, the course from midtown keyboard to fairgrounds panel took a full four hours, but by last week Time Inc. Communications Manager John F. Striker and his new friend, Mr. Reader, had trimmed the time to 30 minutes and were still gaining.

Putting the news on the communications arches is one of several Time Inc. projects in connection with the fair. The others range wide -- from publication of the official guidebook, map and souvenir book to lending color illuminations of Sistine Chapel frescoes to the Vatican Pavilion.

From the hour it opened, the fair began making a wide variety of news. Modern Living reports on what's what at the fair; The Nation covers President Johnson's appearance there amid the civil rights demonstrations; Art reproduces the famed Piet`a in its controversial setting; Science reports on the reproduction of both the Old and New Testaments on a sheet of plastic less than 2 in. square; and on the periphery, Music presents four pages of color and a review of the fair-timed opening of Lincoln Center's new Theater of the Dance. What other wonders -- and disappointments -- will emerge as the fair shakes down, TIME will tell.

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