My Week In Media: Ben Schott

Last week I read...

A lot of pieces about the Iraq Survey Group report, not least because I was keen to see how the coverage differed between the American and British press. In addition to my daily reading of The Times, The Guardian and The New York Times, I read the detailed online coverage in The Washington Post, the LA Times and The Wall Street Journal. Once the report was published, I downloaded it as a PDF from the New York Times website.

The Financial Times coverage of Gordon Brown's Pre-Budget Report was characteristically informative, as was the analysis on the Economist website.

All the papers attempted to cover the incredible and fast-moving story of Alexander Litvinenko's poisoning, and it was interesting to compare and contrast the various conspiracy theories mooted by experts and pundits. Private Eye, Time, Newsweek and Heat completed the week's media reads.

Last week I surfed...

I am a fan of Guido Fawkes's Order-Order blog (www.order-order.com), and I kept in touch with this every now and then to get the latest gossip on the cash-for-peerages allegations and investigation. Gawker, Slate and the Huffington blogs are useful ways to keep in touch with the American blogosphere. And www.turkmenbashi. org is a temptation I cannot resist. I find that the quotidian e-mail from www. dailycandy.com/london is an effortless and elegant way to find out snippets of what is new and worthwhile in London. I used YouTube to catch up on two important and controversial moments in the week's TV in the USA: the decision by NBC to define the situation in Iraq as "civil war", and Robert Gates' telling admission that the US was losing the war in Iraq.

Last week I listened to...

BBC Radio 4's I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue is essential listening; I caught it on the superb listen again service. I listened to classic episodes of Round the Horne and Yes Minister (with Paul Eddington, pictured) on BBC7. I downloaded Prime Minister's Questions as a podcast from the Guardian site, and caught the latest InDesign Secrets podcast. If I was up in time, I listened to The Phil Jupitus Breakfast Show on BBC6 Music.

Ben Schott is the editor of Schott's Almanac 2007 (Bloomsbury, £16.99); www.schottsalmanac.com