Populist magazine The Week has sprung up with a circulation of 500,000 — no small feat in a climate where newsweeklies like Time and Newsweek continue to see their numbers slide. Haven’t picked The Week up recently? You’ll appreciate its “front of the book of the Economist” approach, where the week’s biggest news items from around the world get summarized into bite size pieces, leaving you significantly more worldly after flipping through its pages. Perhaps you also forgot who’s running the magazine: Felix Dennis, of that little magazine that refused to grow up, Maxim.

So how come this magazine is such a breakout hit, while its brethren are fighting for oxygen? Because Dennis & Co. have thrown journalistic principles in the crapper!

“It’s about utility, not achieving an apotheosis of beautiful journalism,” he said. “If you write for the reader, you’ll always have a job.”

That faint sound you hear right now is a thousand establishment journalists reaching for their Maalox. What Kotok brags about is exactly what unnerves many pundits about The Week. They see it as something journalistically unholy because, they conclude, it dumbs down the news to fit a business model.

If this seems familiar to you, merely substitute the words “USA Today” for “The Week.” Since its founding in 1982, Gannett Co.’s USA Today has been criticized for making news more palatable to a mass audience who wants the publication to do its thinking for it. [Marketwatch]