
Authors, poets replace reporters at an Israeli newspaper for one day - sweetdreams
http://www.forward.com/articles/107571/
======
TrevorJ
I think it is funny that they tampered with all the serious news stories but
dared not replace the sports section.

~~~
absconditus
My favorite sports writer:

[http://thebivouac.wordpress.com/2008/07/16/the-kentucky-
derb...](http://thebivouac.wordpress.com/2008/07/16/the-kentucky-derby-is-
decadent-and-depraved/)

------
edw519
Kinda reminds me of the time Robert Frost was a technical writer for a day :-)

    
    
      The Thread Not Traversed 
      
      TWO threads diverged in a yellow stack,  
      And sorry I could not traverse so  
      And be one parser, long I stood  
      And looped through one as long as I could  
      To where it spawned in the overflow; 
      
      Then invoked the other, as just as fair,  
      And having perhaps the faster stats,  
      Because it was hashed and wanted wear;  
      Though as for that the data there  
      Had run them into third normal form, 
      
      And both that session equally lay  
      In objects no instance had trodden class.  
      Oh, I kept the version for another day!  
      Yet knowing how code leads on to code,
      I doubted if I should ever unit test. 
      
      I shall be documenting this with a sigh  
      Somewhere many transactions hence:  
      Two threads diverged in a stack, and I—  
      I took the one less traversed by,  
      And that has caused the site to fly.

------
sp332
Has anyone got a link to any of the cited articles? I haven't had luck
Googling their English website haaretz.com or the Hebrew website haaretz.co.il
.

~~~
nir
I don't know if any of this was translated to English, the Hebrew articles are
here: <http://www.haaretz.co.il/hasite/spages/1091226.html>

It was done as part of "Book Week", which is celebrated every year around this
time in Israel. They got some of Israel's leading writers like David Grossman
and Etgar Keret to take part and some of the stories are excellent.

My favorite touch was the weather report, which contains a poem for summer
written by one of Israel's best known poets, Roni Somek. The weather reports
talks of hot & humid early summer weather, and he writes (roughly translated):

    
    
      Summer is the least
      sharp pencil of the seasons' box
      I write with it
      a love letter
      to the tailor who cut off
      the women's blouses
      and skirts
      a few inches
      of winter.
      This year too, perhaps
      it will be hot in the valleys
    

(It's a lot better in the original form ;))
<http://www.haaretz.co.il/hasite/spages/1091757.html>

~~~
rms
Any idea what the paper, English edition of Haaretz had today if not
translations of these articles?

~~~
nir
The authors didn't really write the whole newspaper, just some magazine-style
reports and some of regular features - weather report, TV critic, letters to
the editor (by another poet) etc. News, sports etc items were still there,
written by the regular reporters.

(BTW, in general, Haaretz in English is quite different and better quality
than the Hebrew version. This is perhaps why Haaretz is held in much higher
regard outside Israel.)

~~~
rms
What makes the English Haaretz better? I don't speak Hebrew but I remember
comparing the (paper) English and Hebrew editions of Haaretz and not noticing
much difference. I can't specifically recall looking past the front page
though.

My tour guide in Israel was a former Haaretz English translator and he
nitpicked several things in my English copy, saying their translators had
gotten sloppy since he left.

~~~
nir
In the Hebrew version, every other article contains spelling mistakes and
glaring errors - and that's before the simply poor, Techcrunch-like level of
reporting standards. Due to financial issues and internal power struggles,
Haaretz lost many of its experienced writers and editors in the last decade
and is unable to attract new talent when it pays sub-minimum wage salaries.

(This is true for most of Israeli media, btw, it's just that Haaretz is for
some reason held at higher regard by outsiders)

All this seems to affect the English version less, probably because it
contains a small number of editors/writers relative to the Hebrew one, and
they tend to have learned their craft in the US/UK, which still have far
better journalism standards than most of the world.

------
quizbiz
Google Translator (Hebrew > English) of the articles:
[http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.haa...](http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.haaretz.co.il%2Fhasite%2Fspages%2F1091226.html&sl=iw&tl=en&hl=en&ie=UTF-8)

