Spork - We Like It

Life is busy. There's a never-ending stream of stuff that needs doing. Sometimes it can seem impossible to squeeze it all into one brain and keep it organised. To make things worse, the entire rest of the world insists on having their own life too, and we're expected to stay informed about what they're up to. Information overload? No time to stay current with world events? You, my friend, need The Week.

The whole damn world in A4

As The Week point out on their site, seven days worth of Britain's daily and Sunday newspapers comes to a staggering 5,800 pages. Bloody hell. That's way too much information for any one person to stand a chance of absorbing. The Week scoops out the lean meat from that bloated fatty blob of information, throws away the crusty old bits, and rewraps it in a nice friendly A4 format for delivery to your home. Running to 35 cleanly laid out pages it fits easily into your life and is small enough to be very commuter friendly. After all, there's nothing intellectually impressive about battering the poor hapless passenger in the adjacent seat with your monstrous broadsheet.

News is awesome!

Where The Week scores big is that it doesn't dumb the stories down for the sake of brevity. The lead pages are divided between "The Main Stories" and "How They Were Covered", distilling both the facts of the events and the varying editorial reaction to them. Each story is woven together with comments from sources around the world, providing a compact and intelligent summary of the issues. The Week may simply regurgitate the contents of other papers, but it does it in an extremely clever way, which is very accessible to the reader.

It also provides something the newspapers don't. The magazine devotes a large chunk of it's middle section to it's "Best of..." articles. British, American, and worldwide newspapers all get to put in their 2 cents. Editorial bias seems refreshingly absent, and the selection of stories from around the world is interesting and relevant.

It must be true- I read
it in the tabloids

Besides the headlines all the standard newspaper fare puts in an appearance. Health and science, sport, gossip, travel, food, business and shopping are covered, with some slightly more quirky offerings lurking in the sidebars, such as the "Boring but Important" column, and "It Must Be True, I Read It in the Tabloids". Plus, of course, it has the ubiquitous sudoku and laughable ads for iron-free chinos that even your dad wouldn't wear.

The Week doesn't suggest you should stop reading newspapers, but it does provide a nice backup for busy people. Some have accused it of being "news for slackers" but the way I see it, if you go to the trouble of buying and reading it every week, then how much of a waster can you be? After all, at least you're trying, right?

Or e-mail it the old-fashioned way

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