I also get a serious readerly woody for great newspapers, a love first kindled while fighting for sections around our family’s ink-stained, paper-cluttered dining room table in Ottawa.
Finally, as this blog makes clear, I’ve got a long-standing fascination with Israel and Israeli culture and politics.
So just imagine how many degrees of heaven I was in, when I opened the latest issue of The New Yorker to discover an in-depth feature (by editor-in-chief David Remnick no less!) about the influential left-wing Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz (whose English edition I read on a regular basis online and which I devour whenever I’m in Israel).
It’s a fascinating profile of a complex publication — that rare paper where the publisher actually pushes his editorial staff to be more radical, more provocative, and risk alienating readers more than they often want to. The title says it all: “Haaretz prides itself on being the conscience of Israel. Does it have a future?”
Read it and decide for yourself.