The Week magazine has hired a new top editor and raised its rate base for the third time in a year.

Francis Wilkinson , formerly the blog editor at the Huffington Post, has assumed the newly created position of executive editor at the fast-growing news and opinion magazine owned by Felix Dennis .

Mr. Wilkinson, 48 years old, a former Democratic consultant and reporter, last year oversaw the expansion of the Huffington Post where he recruited many of the site's bloggers. In the early 1990s he won a National Magazine Award for a story about abortion that appeared in Glamour magazine.

In his new role he will serve as a deputy to William Falk , the magazine's editor in chief, said Steven Kotok , general manager of The Week. Mr. Wilkinson will help Mr. Falk edit the magazine and will be responsible for expanding and bringing more original content to theweek.com, the URL that the company acquired earlier this month.

Separately, The Week is set to announce that effective in January it will raise its rate base by 25,000 readers to 500,000. The increase is the third since January 2008 and represents a doubling of circulation since 2004.

The Week is the only remaining U.S. magazine property owned by Mr. Dennis. The British entrepreneur brought the lad magazine Maxim to the U.S., but in recent years has sold most of his U.S. magazine assets, including Maxim and Blender, to focus on The Week and prepare it for launch in other countries.

By holding onto The Week and investing in its expansion, Mr. Dennis has bet that the magazine can succeed at a time when so many other weekly news publications are slipping. Time and Newsweek have been forced to cut their rate base and U.S. News & World Report recently announced it will publish every other week instead of weekly.

The Week, which condenses commentary on the world's news into small, easily digestible bites, so far has mostly weathered the storm. Ad pages increased 5.3% in 2007 while the rest of the industry was flat, according to the Publishers Information Bureau, although so far this year The Week has had a tougher run. Ad pages were down 12.2% through June.

As part of The Week's expansion plans the company also has hired four new senior sales executives. Mark St. Germain , a former ad executive at Condé Nast, has been named Los Angeles advertising director. The magazine also has created new sales positions to cover Atlanta, Asia and the European luxury market.