More Than a Hiatus
Got a little behind in putting together the recycling pile, so I've been staring for a while at the last print issue of The Jewish Week, dated July 31. Not the latest. The last.
The Jewish Week had been rattling the tin cup for a while. It's published by a non-profit, which had already solicited contributions from readers, and when the pandemic hit, like all over print media, it was starved for advertising. That's especially troubling when circulation is already down to around 40,000 from 65,000 at its peak, and a lot of readers got it free with contributions to UJA-Fed.
Still, it was the largest Jewish newspaper in the U.S. and often punched above its weight with investigative reports on sexual abuse by Hasidic rabbis and serial sexual harassment by one of the Jewish world's most prominent philanthropists. Commentary was often provocative and it provided reliable coverage of Israel, especially its sometimes-fraught relationship with the American Jewish community.
But that wasn't enough to save the print edition. Many daily newspapers have cut back on their print frequency because of declining readership and ads. Many others--especially weeklies--suspended print editions when Covid-19 didn't disappear like a miracle.
However, no one should expect to have The Jewish Week ever show up in their mailbox again. Various articles in the last print edition used iterations of "hiatus" or "suspend" to describe what was happening. But it's suspended just like presidential candidates suspend a campaign. It's over, even if The New York Times said The Jewish Week was "pausing."
The best evidence of that comes from the paper's own editor-in-chief Andrew Silow-Carroll (who I knew when he was editor of the Albany Student Press and I was a reporter and editor there, and he was just Andy Carroll). He told the Times: “The print model has been broken for a number of years now, compounded, quite honestly, by a lack of Jewish engagement. Maybe that’s an easy way of saying we have an older readership that isn’t being replaced. And the way to find those readers, I think, is online, which is a reason I thought a move like this was inevitable.”
He's right about the broken print model. Ditto for the Jewish engagement part. And, yes, it's true those still reading print are older (guilty as charged). But to simply assume those under 60 are lying in wait for a digital version to consume simply isn't so, especially when it's a much diminished version of the print offering. About half of an already-slender staff--some of whom had been there for parts of five decades--are gone. And it shows, given the current version of the website, which like other Jewish papers, sits on a platform run by Times of Israel.
Some more observant--as in religiously observant--readers, said they read the Jewish Week during the Sabbath, when they are forbidden to use electronic media. Now, it's out of sight, out of mind. That's a shame. Because the Jewish community needs more information. More transparency. More accountability. The Jewish Week provided that for 45 years. How much longer is an open question that may not have a really good answer.
