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- <text id=92TT0702>
- <title>
- Mar. 30, 1992: From The Managing Editor
- </title>
- <history>
- TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1992
- Mar. 30, 1992 Country's Big Boom
- </history>
- <article>
- <source>Time Magazine</source>
- <hdr>
- FROM THE MANAGING EDITOR, Page 4
- </hdr><body>
- <p> Most journalists discover their calling in fairly direct ways:
- a pep talk from an English teacher, perhaps, or a stint on the
- high school newspaper. Jim Kelly got the news bug when he was
- negotiating a treaty on long-range nuclear missiles. It
- happened when he was an undergraduate at Princeton University's
- Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs,
- preparing to take part in a mock U.S.-Soviet negotiating session
- on SALT II. "I thought the exercise was pretty silly," says Jim.
- "Besides, doing the reporting on both sides' positions was more
- intriguing to me than being part of the action. That's when I
- began to think I was a born observer."
- </p>
- <p> After graduating from Princeton in 1977 (and getting his
- own pep talk from author and former TIME writer John McPhee,
- with whom he took a journalism class), Jim came to TIME. He
- started out writing Milestones, where he learned that a life
- story could be told in a paragraph if necessary. He went on to
- handle slightly longer pieces in the Nation, World and Press
- sections, and became World editor in 1988. Last fall Jim was
- named assistant managing editor, overseeing a variety of
- sections, including Nation, Law, Education, Books and Interview.
- </p>
- <p> That eclectic array of responsibilities is perfectly in
- keeping with Jim's range of interests. He is a voracious reader,
- of everything from Hollywood trade papers to international
- political journals, and can opine as fluently on David
- Letterman's monologues as on the Middle East peace talks. "I'm
- almost as curious about why the royals split up as about why
- Tsongas quit the Democratic race," he says.
- </p>
- <p> As Jim's duties have changed here, so has the magazine.
- "When I first came to the Nation section, we would write lots
- of stories about the President's week," he says. "Now we're not
- satisfied just to recite what happened. We analyze why things
- happen and why they matter." As the magazine continues to
- change, you can be sure that Jim will be intimately involved.
- "Working here is a selfish endeavor," he says. "It satisfies my
- interests, curiosities and passions." Those are precisely the
- qualities that define a first-rate editor.
- </p>
- <p>-- Henry Muller
- </p>
-
- </body></article>
- </text>
-
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