Earthweek

Earthweek - A Diary of the Planet is a syndicated newspaper column created by Steve Newman. It is published weekly on various days by subscribing newspapers, and reports on events in Earth's natural history. The feature was the first fully paginated newspaper column to be distributed with placed graphics, thanks to the growing popularity of the Macintosh platform in newspaper graphics departments during the late 1980s.

Due to the slow modem speeds common in 1988, early versions of Earthweek were limited to low-resolution graphics. Subscribing newspapers maintained a library of individual icons and the base map, which were used by the "wire frame" of the Pagemaker document distributed to them each week. Earthweek is now created in QuarkXPress with Adobe Illustrator graphics, and is delivered as a complete, integrated package.

A PDF version of the feature may be downloaded by readers in markets where Earthweek is not published.

Typical content

From man-made occurrences to nature's own news, Earthweek provides a weekly overview of headline events affecting our planet—cyclones, floods, brushfires, oil spills and climate change. Other stories are a bit more unusual—monkey attacks, snake infestations and a bounty of phenomena as diverse as nature itself.