Ha’aretz is the oldest newspaper in Israel; on Wednesday they sent all their journalists home and published an edition written by poets and novelists. Here’s the business report by Avri Herling:
Everything’s okay. Everything’s like usual. Yesterday trading ended. Everything’s okay. The economists went to their homes, the laundry is drying on the lines, dinners are waiting in place… Dow Jones traded steadily and closed with 8,761 points, Nasdaq added 0.9% to a level of 1,860 points…. The guy from the shakshuka [an Israeli egg-and-tomato dish] shop raised his prices again….
The TV report by Eshkol Nevo:
I didn’t watch TV yesterday
And the weather report by Roni Somek:
Summer is the pencil
that is least sharp
in the seasons’ pencil case
There’s a full article on it at Forward:
The next day, Haaretz’s usual staff reporters were back on the job. Yossi Melman, Haaretz’s commentator on security and intelligence issues, thinks it should stay that way for a while. “I’m not sure this is the right approach,” Melman said. “It would be very difficult to replace journalists with authors and run a newspaper. We are trained; we know how to do it. For them, you know, there is a tendency to elaborate.”
At the editor’s desk, Alfon sees things otherwise. “I think it is a humility lesson for journalists,” he said. He kept five writers in the newsroom in case of breaking news, but nothing big happened. So the authors’ accounts prevailed, gripping stories were printed and dozens of readers called in with praise.
“Thirty-one writers decided, what are the real events of the day?” he mused. “What is really important in their eyes? They wrote about it, and our priorities as journalists were suddenly shaken by this.”
Man that is such good quality…though I’m not sure if Sam Hunt writing for the Dom Post is such a brilliant idea…actually it wouldn’t make it any worse.
Comment by david c — June 12, 2009 @ 8:46 am
That’s awesome… even a baby journalist gets jealous when he looks at that… (and he remembers those halcyon days when he dreamed of being a poet…)
David C – Right about Sam Hunt’s ability in not making the Dom Post any worse, but I think I’d get one of Wellington’s youngsters to give it a shot in Charlotte Simmonds…
PB.
Comment by Paul McBeth — June 12, 2009 @ 8:53 am
[...] Newspaper death watch – desperate remedies at Dim Post [...]
Pingback by Did you see the one about « Homepaddock — June 12, 2009 @ 3:51 pm