Need To Know, also known as NTK, was an email newsletter, published late on Fridays, written by former Wired journalist and Irish Times columnist Danny O'Brien and former Wired and Future journalist Dave Green. It was devised in 1996 while Green and O'Brien worked at Wired. NTK was published weekly from 1997 until 2004, when it moved to fortnightly publication. From May 2005 until July 2006 it continued on a monthly schedule, though it often ran late; the final newsletter on the website is a "MiniNTK" dated 8 January 2007. The newsletter billed itself as "the weekly tech update for the UK" (later "week^H^H^H^H fortnightly" or "week^H^H^H^H now-monthly") and presented the highlights of the week's happenings in the IT, blogosphere and general internet community, with a focus on UK culture and politics. It also looked at less weighty matters such as confectionery and nudity in films. It took an irreverent tone similar to The Register, Private Eye and Viz.

Format

The newsletter is also available on the World Wide Web and has used a fixed-width ASCII text-based layout since its inception. It was sent to subscribers in plain text email. Since 2004, the website has offered readers the ability to use their own style sheet. Each newsletter comprised (at least some of) the following sections:

Significant events