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What this is for, and what it will never do
A weekly summary of other people's reporting only works if it is done in a way the people doing the reporting would call fair. Here is where the lines are.
There are already good packaging trade titles. Several of them are very good, and most of them are regional — which is the problem this publication exists to solve. If your work touches a supply chain that crosses more than one continent, keeping up means reading a South African monthly, an Indian weekly, an Australian daily and four European titles, and noticing on your own that three of them ran versions of the same story.
Packaging Weekly reads those titles so that you can read one page on a Friday. That is the whole proposition. It is a summary, not a substitute, and the distinction matters enough to be worth writing down properly.
Feeds, not article pages
Every item in the Friday edition comes from a publisher’s own RSS feed. Not from their website, not from a crawler, not from an aggregator that got it from a crawler. A feed is the publisher’s own offer of the content, published deliberately and in a format designed to be read by software. An article page is not the same thing, and the difference is not a preference or a courtesy.
This rules out sources that would otherwise be useful. Some titles publish no feed at all, and they are simply absent from these pages. That is the cost of the rule, and it is worth paying.
Written here, checked by machine, read by a person
Headlines and summaries are written from the extract the publisher chose to put in the feed. They are then checked automatically: anything that keeps a run of the original’s wording is rejected and rewritten, and anything that fails twice is dropped rather than published.
A short edition is the intended failure mode. A wrong one is not.
Then a person reads the whole thing against the linked originals before it goes anywhere. The draft arrives as a pull request every Friday morning and nothing reaches this site without someone merging it. There is no version of this where a machine publishes directly.
What the numbers will look like
Coverage is uneven, and pretending otherwise would be the easier thing to do. The UK and European feed pool is deep and will reliably fill its section. Africa is essentially South African. Outside India and Singapore, most Asian packaging trade press does not publish in English, and no amount of good intention changes that.
So some weeks a region will be thin, and some weeks it will be missing. When a region has nothing worth carrying, its section is left out entirely — no empty heading, no line apologising for it. A missing section is honest. A padded one is not, and it would be immediately obvious to anyone who works in that region.
What is not here
No ad network. No third-party cookies. No tracking pixel. The ads on this site are sold and served by us, which means an advertiser gets markup or a static image and nothing inside an ad makes a request anywhere else. This is stated in the footer of every page, and it is a commitment rather than a current state of affairs.
No opinion in the edition, either. The Friday page reports what other people reported, and it does that flatly and without editorialising. Argument goes here, on the blog, written by hand, where you can tell whose view you are reading.
If you publish one of these feeds
Two things. First, every item links back to you, with your name on it, and the link is the point rather than a formality — the summary is meant to send people to your reporting, not to replace it.
Second, if you would rather not be included, say so and the source comes out the same day. No discussion, no case to make, no form. That offer is not a negotiating position.