Magazine Content

The Week: The world presented in the May 27 issue of The Week is a broad but condensed picture of the world as seen through the eyes of others (the title is dated ahead the same way Time and Newsweek are, but is on a slightly different news schedule). The magazine doesn’t dispatch reporters to cover events or use them to work the phones; it culls through pages and pages of newsprint, magazines and Web sites to produce a summary of what others have offered as the week’s news.

The magazine, founded by Jolyon Connell, a onetime White House reporter, is modeled after the briefing created daily for the Oval Office. And The Week throws its net wide to get its content. The New York Times is heavily represented in its pages, but the May 27 issue carries excerpts and ideas from the Glasgow Herald, Turin’s La Stampa, Mexico City’s La Journada, even Cigar Aficionado. The excerpts are generally short, sometimes a few paragraphs and sometimes only a few sentences. But they offer a quick summary of what the main piece was about, and the brevity of the pieces allows for a broad look at the news of the previous seven days. Of all the titles we examined, the Week comes closest to offering a recap of the week’s news, and that is what it strives to do.

The Week features more of the Big Stories from May 11 than any magazine studied, more even than U.S. News. The May 23 issue has articles about, or at least mentions, five of the stories — Iraq , United Airlines, King Tut, the Blockbuster board and CAFTA. It also deals with the North Korea story in the previous week’s issue, since the magazine comes out on a different schedule from the traditional weeklies.

Cover — The main image is a sketch of a befuddled Charles Darwin sitting in a classroom holding up a paper entitled “The Origin of Species” graded with a large: F. The cover line: “Doubting Darwin, Should schools teach ‘intelligent design?’ “ The sketch shows the usual approach the magazine takes to its cover art, a cheeky take on what it considers the week’s biggest story. Down the left side of the cover are four teases: “Did Bush nominate extremists?” “When cousins fall in love,” “Has the Force run its course?” and “The return of the nasty boss.” The teases are notable for their variety — everything from court appointments to the movie “Star Wars Episode III” — and for their sheer number. Like the Economist, The Week likes to get as many subjects as it can on its cover.

The “cover story” is not much different or much longer than any of the other stories in the issue. It is a half-page discussion of the intelligent design debate consisting of three long quotations from other publications — a column by the Boston Globe’s Ellen Goodman, a post from Brian McNicoll of Townhall.com and a post from Slate’s William Saletan. The piece itself takes no position. Goodman is against intelligent design, McNicoll is for it and Saletan says the theory is an admission of defeat from biblical literalists because they have at least had to accept the basic premise behind evolution, change over time.

The article on Bush’s judicial nominees has the same format and is the same size — a half-page of quotations, this time from six different writers in publications spanning the political continuum from the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post to the Wall Street Journal and National Review Online. Those critical of the federal appeals court nominees in question (Janice Rogers Brown, William Pryor and Priscilla Owen, all now confirmed to federal courts) find them too radical; quotes from the supporting publications emphasize their qualifications for the bench.

The pieces on “cousins in love” and “the nasty boss” are straight excerpts from other publications — in the former case a column by the Chicago Tribune’s Steve Chapman about cousins who want to marry but can’t in Pennsylvania, the latter a business story from USA Today.

The piece about “Star Wars” rounds up reviews by A.O. Scott of the New York Times, Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times, Anthony Lane of the New Yorker, Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune’s Michael Wilmington.

Other pieces — Everything else is brief, but the list of topics is long. A quick glance shows the breadth — military base closings, the fight over John Bolton, fighting in Iraq, Los Angeles’s new mayor, Lance Armstrong saving sperm to have children later, the formerly credentialed White House “reporter” Jeff Gannon and a one-page “Briefing” on the right to die inspired by the Terri Schiavo case.

That’s all in the front of the magazine’s news section, along with three pages called “The world at a glance…” which feature maps of the continents marked with dots and lines that connect to one-paragraph reports. The items consist of everything from a severed fingertip supposedly found in a bowl of Wendy’s chili to the launching of a television network backed by President Hugo Chavez in Venezuela to the push in Rome to make Pope John Paul II a saint and the killing of hundreds of civilians in Uzbekistan by government troops.

After all that there are three pages devoted to the “Best columns” in the United States , Europe and elsewhere. Along with columns from the New York Times and Chicago Tribune, there are selections from Italy , the Netherlands , Iraq and Russia . There is also a short item called “It must be true… I read it in the tabloids.”

Then there are two more pages of “Talking points” where the big topics of the week, some heavy and some lighter, are boiled down to what people have written for and against them. This is where the Darwin piece appears, along with items about Yalta , Pope Benedict and the Rolling Stones. Then come two pages of editorial cartoons from the past week. At this point, not even half-way through the issue, the biggest stories of the last seven days have largely been addressed.

That still leaves the rest of the issue for a vast assortment of topics. The Week has sections for health and science, reviews of books, film, music and the stage, plus food and drink (recipes for lobster rolls and blueberry cobbler as well as an excerpt of a review on a new Chicago restaurant). A one-page travel section runs excerpts from stories on areas ranging from Uruguay to Bethesda , Md. and Madison , Wis.

The Week is Reader’s Digest meets the blogoshpere — an inclusive shorthand summary of the week’s events as seen through the eyes of others.