Thursday, January 21, 2010
Newspapers Are Competing for Orthodox Readers
The newspaper business has been in a tailspin for a long time now — everywhere, it seems, except among Orthodox Jews.
Hitting the Big Time: Even as other papers are scaling back, The Jewish Star is expanding in a bid to grab more readers.
The staying power of the Orthodox press can, of course, be reduced to one simple reason: the Sabbath.
“On Shabbes there is no Internet, no BlackBerry, no electronics, and people have time,” said Yitzchok Saftlas, president of Bottom Line Marketing, a public relations firm that targets the Jewish community.
Now, even as many secular papers are retrenching, one small Orthodox Long Island weekly, The Jewish Star, is expanding. In a bid to grab a bigger share of the Orthodox newspaper-reading public, it is venturing into the urban turf of its counterparts in New York City.
There are already at least three English-language newspapers with strong presences in the Orthodox communities of the greater New York area — all of which are also distributed nationally. The weekly Yated Ne’eman was started in the late 1980s, and the daily English version of the Israeli newspaper Hamodia was founded in 1997. Both cater largely to ultra-Orthodox, or Haredi, readers.
It’s The Jewish Press, however, with a weekly circulation of nearly 50,000 copies, that is still the leader. Founded in the 1960s, the Orthodox tabloid has always been “representative of Brooklyn Jewry both in terms of its religious values and its social values,” said Jeffrey Gurock, a Yeshiva University historian and the author of the 2009 book from Indiana University Press, “Orthodox Jews in America.” For many years, the paper was a platform for Rabbi Meir Kahane, founder of the radical Jewish Defense League.
The Jewish Press, according to observers, expresses unabashedly right-wing political views and features an unapologetic presentation of Orthodoxy, with content that is heavy on features and opinion columns. But while Hamodia and Yated Ne’eman are both extremely religiously conservative — no photos of women appear in either paper — The Jewish Press has the greatest claim on the more religiously centrist Orthodox populations in the greater New York area.
The Jewish Star, founded in 2002 and until this month serving only the Orthodox community of Nassau County’s Five Towns, has a circulation of no more than 10,000 copies. But starting next month, according to Mayer Fertig, the paper’s publisher and editor, it will expand into New York City’s five boroughs, with street-side news boxes and distribution in synagogues and stores from the Flatbush section of Brooklyn to Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Fertig did not want to give the exact number that will be distributed for free in New York City but said it would be “in the low thousands.”
Fertig also declined to speak directly about potential competition with The Jewish Press, and representatives of The Jewish Press did not respond to calls seeking comment. But the way Fertig talks about his paper suggests that he thinks there is an audience whose needs the other papers aren’t meeting.
http://www.forward.com/articles/123924/
Hitting the Big Time: Even as other papers are scaling back, The Jewish Star is expanding in a bid to grab more readers.
The staying power of the Orthodox press can, of course, be reduced to one simple reason: the Sabbath.
“On Shabbes there is no Internet, no BlackBerry, no electronics, and people have time,” said Yitzchok Saftlas, president of Bottom Line Marketing, a public relations firm that targets the Jewish community.
Now, even as many secular papers are retrenching, one small Orthodox Long Island weekly, The Jewish Star, is expanding. In a bid to grab a bigger share of the Orthodox newspaper-reading public, it is venturing into the urban turf of its counterparts in New York City.
There are already at least three English-language newspapers with strong presences in the Orthodox communities of the greater New York area — all of which are also distributed nationally. The weekly Yated Ne’eman was started in the late 1980s, and the daily English version of the Israeli newspaper Hamodia was founded in 1997. Both cater largely to ultra-Orthodox, or Haredi, readers.
It’s The Jewish Press, however, with a weekly circulation of nearly 50,000 copies, that is still the leader. Founded in the 1960s, the Orthodox tabloid has always been “representative of Brooklyn Jewry both in terms of its religious values and its social values,” said Jeffrey Gurock, a Yeshiva University historian and the author of the 2009 book from Indiana University Press, “Orthodox Jews in America.” For many years, the paper was a platform for Rabbi Meir Kahane, founder of the radical Jewish Defense League.
The Jewish Press, according to observers, expresses unabashedly right-wing political views and features an unapologetic presentation of Orthodoxy, with content that is heavy on features and opinion columns. But while Hamodia and Yated Ne’eman are both extremely religiously conservative — no photos of women appear in either paper — The Jewish Press has the greatest claim on the more religiously centrist Orthodox populations in the greater New York area.
The Jewish Star, founded in 2002 and until this month serving only the Orthodox community of Nassau County’s Five Towns, has a circulation of no more than 10,000 copies. But starting next month, according to Mayer Fertig, the paper’s publisher and editor, it will expand into New York City’s five boroughs, with street-side news boxes and distribution in synagogues and stores from the Flatbush section of Brooklyn to Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Fertig did not want to give the exact number that will be distributed for free in New York City but said it would be “in the low thousands.”
Fertig also declined to speak directly about potential competition with The Jewish Press, and representatives of The Jewish Press did not respond to calls seeking comment. But the way Fertig talks about his paper suggests that he thinks there is an audience whose needs the other papers aren’t meeting.
http://www.forward.com/articles/123924/
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