Israel's Haaretz Newspaper Let Poets Write the News
Posted on June 16, 2009
Forward reports that Haaretz editor-in-chief Dov Alfon let authors and poets write the newspapers' daily news for a day instead of journalists. The poetic reporting resulted in some stock market summaries that were more interesting than usual. Forward says there were also some "gripping journalistic accounts" written by Israel's most famed novelists.
Among those articles were gems like the stock market summary, by author Avri Herling. It went like this: "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 review by Eshkol Nevo opened with these words: "I didn't watch TV yesterday." And the weather report was a poem by Roni Somek, titled "Summer Sonnet." ("Summer is the pencil/that is least sharp/in the seasons' pencil case.") News junkies might call this a postmodern farce, but considering that the stock market won�t be soaring anytime soon, and that "hot" is really the only weather forecast there is during Israeli summers, who's to say these articles aren't factual?What an interesting experiment. You can read the weather report, which was turned into a poem by Ronny Someck, hereAlongside these cute reports were gripping journalistic accounts. David Grossman, one of Israel's most famed novelists, spent a night at a children�s drug rehabilitation center in Jerusalem and wrote a cover page story about the tender exchanges between the patients, ending the article in the style of a celebrated author who�s treated like a prophet: "I lay in bed and thought wondrously how, amid the alienation and indifference of the harsh Israeli reality, such islands - stubborn little bubbles of care, tenderness and humanity - still exist." Grossman's pen transformed a run-of-the-mill feature into something epic.