From the Publisher

By Elizabeth Valk Long

Covering the G-7 summit last week in Tokyo was a tricky reporting job. The national leaders, many of them faltering in the polls at home, badly needed to portray the meeting as a success. All the hype made it harder than usual to get an accurate assessment of the week's achievements. Our correspondents spent all day gathering opinions and information from seven different sides, then devoted their evenings to figuring out how much of it was substance and how much smoke and mirrors. Was the "breakthrough" on the GATT talks a promise to create millions of jobs, or just a first step forward in a still perilous process? Did President Bill Clinton put U.S.-Japan relations back on a friendly footing by his campaign-style charm with the Japanese people? Tough questions call for tougher questioners. Luckily for us, we had Tokyo bureau chief Ned Desmond organizing the effort. "Covering a G-7 demands a lot of discipline and attention," he says. "The most difficult thing is to see behind the expressions of self-congratulation and determine what, if any, progress has really been made."

Ned was part of a force that included Washington colleagues Dan Goodgame and Michael Duffy, who reported on Clinton, correspondent Kumiko Makihara and researcher Satsuki Oba. They spent the week conducting man-in-the-street interviews, reviewing the Japanese press and calling officials, diplomats and trade experts. The Japanese foreign ministry made their job, as well as that of every journalist there, a little easier by arranging efficient daily briefings in the Hotel New Otani and the Hotel Okura, where the Clinton team was based. "The only thing they can't do is add hours to the day," says Desmond. "Reporting a summit is a marathon because there are so many points of view to capture."

Ned joined TIME in 1984 as a researcher, leaving New York to become our New Delhi bureau chief in late 1988. After that stint he boned up for the Tokyo job by taking a six-month leave of absence during which he studied the Japanese language and politics on a fellowship at Oxford. He took over the Tokyo bureau a year ago and was immediately struck by how much his new post was the antithesis of his last. "I rarely wore a tie or saw an office tower on the off-road beats of South Asia," he says, "but now I am in the buttoned-down world of Big Business and G-7 summits. The challenges could not be more different." That may be so, but the appropriate responses -- hard digging and cool analysis -- are the same, and Ned is a seasoned practitioner.