From the Editor-In-chief

By Jason McManus

With this week's issue time has a new managing editor, James R. Gaines, the 13th in a line of succession that goes back to the magazine's founding in 1923. He replaces Henry Muller, who is moving up the masthead to join me in the management of all our Time Inc. magazines as the company's editorial director.

In his 5 1/2 years at the helm of TIME, Muller has brilliantly presided over not only the coverage of some of the most tumultuous years of news in our generation but also the most fundamental redesign of TIME since it invented the newsmagazine. Under Muller, TIME superbly chronicled the collapse of & communism and the end of the cold war. Two years before the 1992 election, in a Man of the Year cover story, it identified the two faces of George Bush that would ultimately deny him re-election. And TIME was the first major news organization to pick out Bill Clinton as the man to watch in the race for the presidency.

That ought to be enough for any managing editor of TIME, but it is not what Muller is proudest of. It is his selection of the Endangered Earth as the Planet of the Year in 1988, a daring play on TIME's traditional Man of the Year choice. Says he: "We took a story that was all around us but that no one had treated in the depth it deserved. And we produced a list of solutions that stand up very well today."

TIME's redesign in 1992, consolidating the essentials of the news in The Week section, which now leads the magazine, and opening up the middle of TIME's pages to longer and more thought-provoking accounts and analyses, was a bold response to the changing needs of readers in the information age. Our aim, Muller says, was to create a magazine "that knows how to speak intelligently to an intelligent audience, enabling serious and thoughtful readers to think through the problems that the country and the world face."

On that foundation Gaines, the new managing editor, intends to build. Formerly the managing editor of our sister publications People and, more recently, Life, he brings to your magazine a sure intuition of what matters most to you and a dedication to founder Henry Luce's original imperative for TIME. His definition of that is "relentless curiosity." TIME, he says, must be "eternally young and fast moving and flexible, able to respond instantly to changes in America's smallest and largest concerns."