The Week

• 1. Introduction

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  The Week was born from a simple frustration: there was too much news, and too little time to read it all. Jolyon Connell, who had worked for the Sunday Telegraph, launched the UK edition in 1995 with a format that was genuinely unusual. Rather than reporting original stories, it gathered what other newspapers and magazines had already published, summarised their arguments, and handed readers a single tidy package each week. The question the magazine was asking was whether busy people would trust a curated digest over the sources themselves. And more than that: would they pay for it? What followed was a publishing experiment that crossed continents, spawned a children's edition, and eventually caught the attention of one of Britain's most colourful media entrepreneurs.

• 2. The Connell Formula

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  Jolyon Connell built The Week around a deliberately restrained idea. Each issue draws on summaries of news stories and opinion columns that other outlets had already published earlier in the same week. Some of those summaries pull from foreign-language media, translated and condensed for English-speaking readers. The approach makes no pretence of breaking stories. Instead, it operates on the premise that the most useful journalism is the journalism that helps readers understand what they have already half-heard. Both the UK and US websites, launched starting in September 2007, carry that same non-partisan ethos, publishing articles that reflect a wide range of perspectives rather than a single editorial line. In 2017, The Week extended the format into audio with a podcast called The Week Unwrapped, which won news podcast of the year at the Publisher Podcast Awards in both 2020 and 2021.

• 3. Felix Dennis and Dennis Publishing

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  Dennis Publishing, the company Felix Dennis founded, became the home of The Week's UK edition. Dennis was a figure larger than the magazine business that made him famous, but his company provided the commercial infrastructure that allowed The Week to expand. When Dennis Publishing acquired the title, it also took on the Australian edition, which launched in October 2008. The relationship between the magazine and its publisher would eventually outlast Dennis himself; in 2021, Future Plc acquired Dennis Publishing along with several of its titles, including The Week, changing the ownership structure that had defined the magazine for years.

• 4. Going Global, Then Pulling Back

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  April 2001 marked The Week's crossing to North America, when the American edition began publishing under The Week Publications. A separate Australian edition followed in October 2008, giving the brand three simultaneous national presences. But the Australian market proved harder to sustain. The final Australian issue, numbered 199, appeared on the 12th of October 2012. At the point of closure, the edition was reaching 28,000 copies sold each week and a readership of 83,000. Those are not negligible numbers, yet they were apparently insufficient to justify continuation. The American edition, by contrast, was still going strong enough in 2021 to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of its launch.

• 5. The Week Junior

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  Since November 2015, The Week has published a children's edition in the UK called The Week Junior, aimed at readers aged 8 to 14. The format adapts the parent magazine's core approach, bringing current affairs to a younger audience through a weekly digest. A US edition of The Week Junior followed in 2020, extending the children's brand to a second national market. The arrival of The Week Junior in the United States came the same year the Publisher Podcast Awards recognised The Week Unwrapped for the first time, a coincidence that shows how broadly the brand was expanding its reach across formats and demographics in the same period.