Last week, Israel’s oldest newspaper, Haaretz, took a one-off chance, temporarily replacing its workaday reporters with 31 of the country’s leading poets and authors. The writers, as writers do, ran amok. They filed epic front-page news reports on daily life in the first person; ruminated about childhood in an interview with the country’s defense minister; and delivered the weather report as a sonnet. The market report, written by a celebrated children’s book author, read like a fairy tale: “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 percent to a level of 1,860 points …” [%comments]
The Poetry of Journalism
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One has to remember that this is a bit of a move of desperation by Ha’aretz. Their circulation has dropped to < 60K, compared to >150K for Ma’ariv and much larger for Yediot Ahronot (I could only find references that say it’s the “largest circulation daily” in Israel). Original, for sure, but a gimmick nonetheless.
@#9
You say “gimmick” like it is a bad thing.
@#9 — Nice try, but the real figures are exactly opposite. According to audited figures, the number of paid subscriptions to Haaretz grew by 8.4 percent in the last year and reached an all-time high of 72,000 copies, while Maariv is down 20% and Yedioth flat.
In marketing language, a gimmick is a unique or quirky special feature that makes something “stand out” from its contemporaries. So, yes, you could call it a gimmick if you’re inclined to.