If you're already familiar with the Informant, or at least with my reviews of previous issues, you'll have a good idea of what to expect: several hundred games and game fragments with languageless annotations, along with sections on combinations and endings, along with a "mini-informant" dedicated to a top player. Those are the meat, there's also a recap of the voting on the best game and theoretical novelty from the previous Informant, along with a list and leading results of practically all the FIDE-rated events covered in the relative time period.
The last few years there have been additional small sections: one with a number of recently composed endgame studies, and then one with a series of what might be thought of as ECO updates: short theoretical offerings presented in tabular format.
There had been a couple of other, rather unfortunate changes in the recent past, but one has been undone and the second is getting fixed. The one that has been fixed was the decision to segregate the games of players in the top 50 from everyone else's; all that bit of pointless elitism did was to waste the reader's time flipping back and forth to get the full picture when looking up their favorite openings. That experiment was already ended in issue 109. The second may not have been a conscious policy, but it was significant anyway, and that was the increasing scarcity of analytical contributions from the top players themselves. During his career Garry Kasparov annotated hundreds of games for the Informant, and continued doing so even after he farmed out annotational duties for periodical like New In Chess to his second Yuri Dokhoian. In recent times, however, the overwhelming majority of Informant annotations have been done by their staff. That's not really a criticism of that staff, which includes plenty of doubtlessly strong and conscientious players, but the most interesting notes - even when just in symbols - will generally come from the players in the game themselves.
There's a way to go before it's back where it was in the glory days, but I've heard that they're working on the problem, and it seems to be getting a little better. To pick out some of the more notable annotators in the current issue, Anand annotates four games, Beliavsky 3, F. Berkes 3, Bologan 4, Kasimdzhanov 1, Polgar 1, Sasikiran 3, Sjugirov 2, I. Sokolov 4, Tiviakov 1, Vitiugov 2 and Volokitin 2. Other noteworthy annotators include Golubev, Marin, Stohl and Stoica, and some of the staff guys do a very good job as well. It's not like it used to be, when all the top players submitted practically all their best games, but it's getting better.
The above is largely recap; now for what's new. First, two minor additions. First, there's a sort of supplement to the combination section with the ungainly title of "Excellent Moves". They understand a combination as requiring a sacrifice at its beginning, so the new section generally involves combinative ideas where the sac doesn't occur on move 1. Second, though of little interest to most practical players, there's a section with mate-in-x problems.
The more substantial addition is another theory section called "CI Labs". Rather than just presenting tables of theory without any context, this time the content is preceded by one or more paragraphs of introductory text. This is useful, explaining what moves or subvariations are currently important and where the key battle lines are being drawn. (Less importantly, the actual material isn't presented in table form, but in sequential - but still word-free - fashion.) There are five articles this time around: one by Robert Markus on the Paulsen, one by Milos Perunovic on the Perenyi's line in the Keres Attack, a third by Ivan Ivanisevic on the Najdorf line 6.Bg5 Nbd7, a fourth on the Chigorin QGD by Dragan Solak, and finally Bojan Vuckovic's look at 7.Be3 in the Exchange Gruenfeld.
I think the Informant is becoming relevant again, especially if its upward trend continues. Recommended to ambitious players rated 2000 and up, correspondence players and theory lovers in general.