The Week

About The Week

In an age of information overload, when readers are drowning in hot takes, breaking-news alerts and endless scrolling feeds, one British magazine built its entire proposition on a gloriously old-fashioned idea: that busy people would pay for someone to read everything and tell them what mattered. The Week, launched in London in 1995, is a weekly news digest that curates, summarises and excerpts the best writing from the world's press — a "take two" on the week's events for readers too busy to keep up the first time around. It has grown into one of Britain's most successful news magazines, spawned American and Australian editions and a children's spin-off, and been acquired by one of the UK's largest magazine publishers.

Edited in London for its UK edition and in New York for its US edition, The Week distils the week's news, comment and culture into a compact, opinionated package. Below is a detailed profile of the magazine: its founding story, editorial formula, ownership, formats, and the place it has carved out in a media landscape that has otherwise been brutal to the traditional news weekly.

History and Founding

The Week was founded in the United Kingdom in 1995 by Jolyon Connell, formerly of the Sunday Telegraph, and published by Dennis Publishing, the company founded by Felix Dennis. Dennis — whose previous publishing hit had been the laddish monthly Maxim — believed there was a market for a stylish, intelligent replay of the week's news, echoing Henry Luce's original vision for Time: a magazine that would let busy readers catch up on what they had missed. When the magazine launched, many media observers were sceptical; as one executive later recalled, a Wall Street Journal headline asked, "Is Felix Dennis Mad?" — and did not mean angry.

The concept, however, found its audience. In April 2001 the magazine began publishing an American edition, edited initially by the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist William Falk, with an initial distribution of 150,000 copies. An Australian edition followed in October 2008, published until October 2012, when it closed with its 199th edition after selling around 28,000 copies a week. In November 2015 the brand extended again with the launch of The Week Junior, a current-affairs magazine aimed at 8- to 14-year-olds, first edited by Anna Bassi, which proved a significant success in its own right and later launched a US edition in 2020. In 2021 The Week celebrated the twentieth anniversary of its first publication in the United States.

Editorial Focus and Audience

The Week's editorial formula is distinctive: rather than commissioning large amounts of original reporting, it aggregates and distils. Each issue summarises the week's major news stories and then excerpts and quotes the most interesting commentary on them from newspapers, magazines and websites around the world, presenting multiple viewpoints side by side. Regular sections cover the week's news, the talking points, the best of the British and foreign press, and the arts — books, film, theatre, music, television and exhibitions.

The tone is urbane, concise and mildly irreverent, aimed at affluent, time-poor professionals who want to feel informed without wading through the full news cycle. The magazine's famous marketing line captures the pitch: it claims to bring readers the best of the British and foreign media in a single sitting. Its readership skews towards educated, higher-income adults, and it has cultivated a loyal subscriber base that values the curation as a service in itself.

Ownership and Publishing

For most of its life The Week was published by Dennis Publishing, the company founded by Felix Dennis. Dennis Publishing published the UK edition from its 1995 launch, and until 2012 also published the Australian edition; the US edition was published by The Week Publications. In August 2021, Future plc — the Bath-based publisher of titles including FourFourTwo, TechRadar and Marie Claire — acquired Dennis Publishing and its portfolio of magazines, including The Week, in a deal worth around £300 million. The Week is now part of Future's large stable of specialist titles.

The magazine's editors-in-chief are Caroline Law for the UK edition and Theunis Bates for the US edition. The UK edition is based in London, the US edition in New York City.

Print Editions and Frequency

The Week is published weekly in both its UK and US editions. The UK edition reported a total circulation of 153,925 in 2021, while the US edition reported 416,358 in the same year — figures that made it one of the rare news weeklies to have grown its circulation during a period when titles such as Newsweek and Time were in steep decline. At its UK peak in the mid-2010s, print sales stood at a little over 193,000.

The print product is deliberately compact and dense — a digest designed to be read cover to cover in a couple of sittings. It carries the ISSN 1533-8304 and is printed on newsprint-style stock that nods to its newspaper-like function.

Digital Presence

The Week's websites, theweek.com/uk for the UK edition and theweek.com for the US edition, extend the magazine's curatorial approach online with daily news summaries, opinion round-ups and cultural coverage. The brand is active on social media and produces email newsletters that translate the digest formula into the inbox. While the magazine was conceived as a weekly print summary — not an obviously digital-native product — its online audience has grown substantially, and the websites serve as both a shop window for subscriptions and a standalone editorial offering.

The Week Junior has its own digital presence aimed at young readers and their parents and teachers, including activity content and resources that complement the print magazine's mission to inform, engage and entertain children — and, in the words of its launch editor, to empower young people to think for themselves.

Iconic Features

The Week's most recognisable features flow directly from its digest model. "The best of the British press" and its foreign-press equivalents excerpt the week's most striking opinion writing with brief, characterful attributions. "Talking points" summarise the arguments raging around the week's big stories. The "News" section compresses seven days of events into crisp, witty précis. Regular arts pages review the week's books, films, plays and exhibitions with unusual brevity and punch.

The magazine's front-of-book "It wasn't all bad" style snippets, its quotations of the week, and its dryly funny sub-editing have given it a house voice that readers describe as addictive: sceptical, well-informed and allergic to pomposity. The Week Junior's features — including news explained for children, puzzles, debates and "ask the experts" pages — adapt the formula for a young audience.

Notable Contributors

Because The Week excerpts rather than employs most of its commentators, its pages carry the voices of hundreds of columnists from across the world's press each year. Its own editorial leadership has included founder Jolyon Connell, long-serving editors of the UK edition, US editor William Falk at launch, and the current editors-in-chief Caroline Law (UK) and Theunis Bates (US). The Week Junior was launched under editor Anna Bassi, who brought experience from Egmont, the BBC and Eaglemoss, and was developed in consultation with children, parents and teachers. The magazine has also attracted high-profile guest columnists and interviewees across its history.

Cultural Impact

The Week's success story has been widely cited as a counter-example to the narrative of the news weekly's terminal decline. As Time, Newsweek and U.S. News & World Report repositioned away from replaying the week's news, The Week zigged the other way — and grew. Industry analysts have pointed to its model as proof that readers will pay for curation: a trusted filter is itself a valuable editorial product in an age of abundance.

The launch of The Week Junior extended that idea to children, creating one of the UK's most successful children's magazines and demonstrating that the digest formula could work for young readers too. The brand's endurance — nearly three decades in the UK and more than two decades in the US — has made it a fixture of the weekly magazine market on both sides of the Atlantic.

Awards and Recognition

The Week has been recognised within the magazine industry for its editorial quality and commercial performance, winning industry awards for newsstand and subscription publishing during its years of circulation growth. The Week Junior has likewise collected awards in the children's media sector, reflecting the success of its mission to create a current-affairs magazine that informs, engages and entertains young readers. The brand's consistent appearance on industry shortlists over many years testifies to the durability of its editorial formula.

Recent Developments

The most significant recent development in The Week's history was its acquisition by Future plc in 2021 as part of the £300 million purchase of Dennis Publishing, placing the title inside one of Britain's largest consumer magazine groups. Under Future, The Week continues to publish weekly in the UK and US, with The Week Junior going from strength to strength as a children's title.

The magazine faces the same structural challenges as all print weeklies — rising costs, changing reading habits and competition from free digital news — but its subscription-led model, loyal readership and distinctive curatorial proposition have given it unusual resilience. Nearly thirty years after Felix Dennis bet that busy people would pay for the week's news done properly, The Week remains the definitive example of the news digest done well.