Talking of Ma’ariv, their new site may look horrible, but their section on religion is fun. It’s full of lively articles by religious people, about religious people, for religious people, and light, silly gossip about the leaders of the Israeli haredi community ("MK Litzman's driver crashed his car"... "Rav Eliashiv skips Gur wedding").
You don’t usually see this kind of material in print in the mainstream, secular Israeli media, and it will be interesting to see how the haredi community reacts over time to a different kind of media scrutiny.
In the meanwhile, however, I wonder whether the section will work for Ma’ariv or against it. In recent years, Ma’ariv has captured a large proportion of religious readers who find Yediot too sleazy and too full of smut (Ma’ariv is perceived as the cleaner, and more serious, tabloid). Increasing its religious content, and its coverage of the Orthodox community, has long been on its agenda, and should theoretically help it in its ratings battle.
But if you look at the comments section on the haredi gossip section, for example, you will find that most of the reactions are negative. The readers, some of whom identify themselves as religious, are blasting it for “disrespect” to rabbis and to Judaism.
What did they expect? Ma’ariv treats everything it writes about with an equally casual tone. But suddenly, it seems, when it writes about the religious community, Ma’ariv is too much a tabloid after all.
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