First and Last in a Series   

A news service that not only saves time, but also provides enough information to keep up cocktail-party conversation has hit the market.

"Somehow the idea bubbled up," says Mickey Kaus, a Slate.com contributor and the author of Series-Skipper, a service that styles itself as extrapolating all of the useful, intriguing and scandalous information from newspaper series and spitting it out into a tight, readable fashion for speedy consumption. I

nspiration for the Slate feature, which debuted in February, stemmed from Kaus' dread over the thought of having to read the Washington Post's eight-part election series "Deadlock." Kaus says he thought it would be helpful to save other people the trouble of reading it while still providing them with the gist of the pieces.

Series-Skipper is broken down into categories such as: "Entertaining Anecdote," "Intriguing but Unexplored Incidents" and "Most Dramatic Scene." Kaus also gives a guesstimate of the time saved by reading Series-Skipper instead of reading the series itself. For the Post treatise: two hours.

Although the public's lack of time to devote to reading a monster piece is a valid problem, says Bill Hamilton, the editor of the Post's project, he is certainly not taking the service seriously. "Like Mickey, it is funny and very amusing, but of course I don't agree with it, certainly not when it applies to us," says Hamilton, assistant managing editor for enterprise. "We felt that we were able to make a real contribution to understanding the 2000 election. It was an exceptional period and it demanded an exceptional account, and we felt very proud of it. I'm sorry he didn't."

The sting of Series-Skipper hit closer to home for Los Angeles Times media reporter David Shaw, whose four-part series "Lights, Camera, Reaction--How the news media cover Hollywood," was Kaus' second target. Kaus, who says he has had a personal beef with Shaw since the reporter interviewed him in 1983, described the series as being "characteristically bloated" and Shaw's writing style as "mildly pompous, smug, occasionally huffy." Kaus turned the 16,000-word series into a 1,445-word skipper that was anything but favorable.

If that wasn't enough of a reduction, Kaus included a Special Bonus Robo-Skipper that gives a 10-sentence synopsis of Shaw's series. And if people cannot hack even reading the summary, Kaus included a Series-Skipper-Skipper that says whether or not the Series-Skipper is even worth reading. In a nutshell: No.

"I am not going to get into a pissing match with a guy who says he has been holding a grudge for 18 years," Shaw says of the criticism. "I think in this era of all news all the time it is useful to have reporting that is not always tied to the hot topic of the day, or of the week, or of the month."

Kaus, who says he is not opposed to projects that are worthwhile, says there's one problem with his new summary service: It "means I have to keep reading these damn series."