Starting a weekly magazine can be one of the fastest ways to lose money in publishing. Now imagine launching a newsweekly with a bare-bones staff, very little money to spend on advertising and limited space for ads in your own pages.

　　Despite this unlikely formula for success, The Week magazine is growing.

　　Unlike time and Newsweek, which employ large reporting staff, The Week has no reporters, just 18 editors who cull hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles from around the world and boil them down to brief, pithy articles.

　　It's presented in a relatively small magazine of about 40 pages that carries very little advertising, making it even more of a breeze to get through. The aim, says General Manager Justin Smith, is to capture the "high end of the newsweekly marketplace, or people who are busy, smart and rich."

　　The magazine uses some unusual tactics to position itself as a must-read. It hosts panel discussions on current affairs and puts on talks by actors and filmmakers about their favorite films. It also publishes quotes from famous people on the cover who gush about how much they like the magazine.

　　The quotes have come from chef Daniel Boulud and movie mogul Harvey Weinstein, among others. Luciano Pavarotti called The Week "as artful as an opera," and Woody Allen said it was "for movers and shakers, and I can't stop shaking."

　　So far, the strategy seems to be working. The magazine is about to announce that its circulation has doubled to 200,000 from the level when it launched in April 2001.

　　The week gets many new readers by word-of-mouth, a rarity in the magazine world, where holding on to the readers you already have is a struggle.

　　Its business plan is closer to that of The Economist, Smith says, which attracts a smart, well-to-do audience and charges premium prices for advertising and subscriptions.

　　Steven kotok, who oversees circulation, says The Week has received an impressive 25,000 new paid subscribers over the past 18 months from a program where readers sign up friends and family to receive trial subscriptions.

　　The week isn't all serious, as can be seen from the wry slogan on the cover: "All You Need to Know About Everything That Matters." It presents news from all over the world, but with a knowing smile, in sections like "Only in America" and "Boring but important."

　　"We are very serious about distilling topics and news, but at the same time we are somewhat amused by the human condition," editor William Falk says.