TheMarker
 | |
Type of site | Economics, Business |
|---|---|
| Available in | Hebrew, English |
| Owner | Haaretz publishing group |
| Editor | Sami Peretz |
| Website |
themarker |
| Commercial | Yes |
| Launched | 2000 |
| Current status | active |
TheMarker (Hebrew: דה-מרקר) is a financial website in Israel, as well as the financial supplement of the daily national newspaper Haaretz.
As of January 2008, also sold as an standalone daily newspaper. TheMarker covers many aspects of business, finance and economy, from high-tech to healthcare, from marketing to capital markets, from economic policy to social unrest.
The chief editor of TheMarker is Sami Peretz. The editor of the monthly magazine is Eytan Avriel. TheMarker alone has about 250 employees. It operates from Haaretz newspaper building in Tel Aviv.
History
TheMarker was founded in 2000 by the journalists Guy Rolnik, Avriel, Ido Pollak and the Haaretz publishing group, as a purely online source of business and finance news. In 2005 TheMarker began printing out a daily paper, appended to Haaretz as the business section. From 2008 it became available as a stand-alone newspaper as well. Today TheMarker belongs entirely to the Haaretz group. Rolnik serves today as deputy publisher of the group.
While the printed press was disappearing or going online, TheMarker went the other way, from an Internet startup into a printed paper. It became one of the first newspapers in the world to start out online. Its unique transformation from virtual press to print won TheMarker the Platinum Effie Award for 2007, granted to the most successful business marketing move in Israel during the last five years. At the time, Rolnik linked up with TheStreet.com, which agreed to buy 20% of the shares in the new venture. "We could have found investors in Israel, but we wanted to avoid conflicts of interest,” Rolnik explained to Shuki Stauber. “The people with capital in Israel were a relatively narrow group of businessmen with sprawling business activity, so there would be an inherent conflict of interest between running a business paper and local investment. We preferred to avoid the constraints involved in writing about companies owned by somebody investing in us. Finding investors abroad solved that problem. Finding an investor which was also a newspaper was the optimal solution."[1]
In its first two years TheMarker contained about fifty pages, and in February 2007 the paper was increased to about eighty pages. Several reports from TheMarker formed the daily economic page of the freely-distributed paper Israel Today in its first year. In 2007 the social network and blog site TheMarker Café began operating on the TheMarker website. In early 2008, prior to publication of the Calcalist, a new economic daily from the Yediot Ahronot media group, TheMarker increased the number of its columns, and also began to be sold as an independent newspaper, separate from Haaretz.
On January 2011 TheMarker launched the "Israel 2021 Initiative", aimed at changing the Israeli public discourse, at the time dominated by political and security issues. TheMarker called for more emphasis on economic issues and long-term planning. The two-day launch event was attended by 3,000 guests and hosted Prime Minister Netanyahu. There were 175 round table discussions on economic and social issues. The 2013 Israeli general election campaigns focused more on economic issues.
In March 2015, journalist and media critic Michael Massing highlighted the work done by TheMarker and Rolnik in an essay “How to fix American Journalism” that appeared in the special issue of The Nation Magazine for it’s 150 years celebration: "TheMarker, an Israeli financial newspaper distributed as a supplement to Haaretz, waged an unflagging campaign beginning in the mid-2000s against the extraordinary concentration of economic power in Israel and the dangers that this development posed to Israeli society and democracy. Led by its founding editor, Guy Rolnik, the paper ran periodic stories and columns that paid special attention to the “Israeli oligarchs,” a small group of billionaires and their families who controlled much of the Israeli economy. When the campaign began, the subject of economic concentration was barely discussed in Israel. The stories fed growing outrage over inequality, leading to a series of mass demonstrations in 2011. Those protests, in turn, spurred the Knesset to pass a bill to break up the Israeli conglomerates. It was a remarkable display of how one news organization, through tenacious and unflinching reporting over a period of years, can help spur systemic change... Remarkably, of the many high-profile digital-journalism sites—the Huffington Post, The Daily Beast, BuzzFeed, Business Insider—not one scrutinizes America’s oligarchs the way TheMarker did Israel’s. ProPublica, the prime investigative site on the web, has done impressive reporting on a number of important subjects, including fracking and the secret Fed tapes, but in general it remains wedded to a traditional narrow-focus approach”[2]
Sections
Each issue of the daily newspaper is divided into sections by topic: news, opinion (by members of the editorial board, including Rolnik, Meirav Arlosoroff, and Sami Peretz, besides contributors); high-tech and telecommunications; real estate and infrastructure; advertising, marketing and media; law; consumer issues; the global economy; and capital markets. The Sunday edition of TheMarker has a reduced format. The weekend edition, distributed on Friday, appears as a magazine-format supplement called Markerweek.
See also
References
- ↑ Stauber, Shuki (2013). I, the Brand!. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform. ISBN 1490402438.
- ↑ "How To Fix American Journalism". The Nation. ISSN 0027-8378. Retrieved 2016-05-16.