News of the Week

"News of the Week" was a recurring segment on the series "Friday Night Weekly". It features the hosts of the show delivering news stories in the form of jokes with punchlines. Stylistically the camera remains fixed on the 2–3 hosts during the segment and square images are placed directly over the face or faces of the non-speaker hosts. It debuted as a part of the canceled pilot episode of the "Friday Night Weekly" talk show and officially premiered in the first episode of the full series, "Meet the Plant". It was featured in all but the final episode, "Epilogue".

Hosts
"News of the Week" was performed by 5 different hosts throughout its 39 episode run with 4 different lineups.
 * Jozef K. Richards and Matt Henry: Season 1, Episodes 1–8; 18 + Season 2, Episodes 2–5; 8–11; 14
 * Jozef K. Richards, Makenzie Boettcher, and Matt Henry: Season 1, Episodes 9–17; 19–25
 * Jozef K. Richards and Alex Trapp: Season 2, Episodes 1; 6–7
 * Jozef K. Richards and Max Machotka: Season 2, Episodes 12–13

Story writing
Typically each host is delivering stories they have written themselves with few exceptions where Makenzie Boettcher read a story written by Jozef K. Richards or Matt Henry.

Style

 * Jozef – Focus on United States and international politics, religious criticism, government overreach, city statistics, human interest, and sports-related news. Occasionally these include light impressions of figures such as Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Jay Leno, Jerry Seinfeld, and Al Pacino.
 * Matt – Focus on entertainment, media, music, video games, celebrities, dumb criminals, and misinterpretations of news stories. "Boston bullies" are a frequent target of his, brought up often as if part of a childhood trauma.
 * Makenzie – Focus on women's issues and strange/offbeat news.
 * Alex – Focus on Colombian and Latin American news.
 * Max – Focus on extreme tragedy, violence, and cruelty. Each story ends with him making-believe the blackbird on his shoulder named Giuseppe is saying, "that's unfortunate," in a high-pitched voice.

News coverage
"News of the Week" stories/jokes were written based on items in the news during the week of the episode's production.