Editor-in-Chief Yaakov Katz sat down with Lahav Harkov, Khaled Abu Toameh and Seth Frantzman for a conversation about the Post, its significance and how their jobs have changed. To mark The Jerusalem Post’s 90th anniversary, Editor-in-Chief Yaakov Katz sat down with Diplomatic Correspondent Lahav Harkov, Palestinian Affairs Correspondent Khaled Abu Toameh and Middle East Affairs Analyst Seth Frantzman for a conversation about the Post, its significance and how their jobs have changed since they became reporters. The full conversation can be heard on The Jerusalem Post Podcast. This is an abbreviated version, edited for style. JPost at 90 Yaakov: Lahav, when you look at 90 years of The Jerusalem Post and where we are and how we’ve gotten here, what comes to mind? Lahav: So, first of all, if we look more broadly at the 90 years of The Jerusalem Post, we used to have this column that was from the archives. I don’t remember if it was every day or every week. If something happened, you’d see how The Jerusalem Post was covering these huge events in Israel’s history and in the world’s history. And it really gives an idea of how significant this newspaper has been in telling Israel’s story to the world. In the past 10 or 12 years, I would say that the thing that has changed the most is how fast everything has become – because of the media environment, more broadly, everything’s moving really fast. Everything is on social media. You have to have some information the second something happens. And that’s challenging in terms of trying to keep up our accuracy and to try to use the sources that we have that other people reporting in English don’t have. But I think that we’ve kept to that challenge. We’ve met that challenge impressively. Yaakov: But I think it’s also extra sensitive in the diplomatic beat, right? Because of this, the information that you publish really could impact Israel’s standing or its ties with a country, or how it’s going to be condemned at the UN or not. Lahav: Yes, there are some stories that you can do and they’re quick and easy; you know, if a leader has a phone call with another leader. But a lot of the important things on the diplomatic beat are happening behind the scenes, and they take a lot of phone calls and a lot of talking to a lot of different people to try to corroborate things. And they’re definitely not instant stories. I used to be on the Knesset beat, and you would have near uniformity of coverage because everything was at the Knesset. You sit in the committee rooms and you might have a different headline, but more or less the same things are happening. But on the diplomatic beat it’s very individual because you’re really getting stories behind the scenes. Yaakov: Right. It’s not just what’s happening. Seth, you’ve traveled the region on behalf of The Jerusalem Post. You look at this 90-year milestone. What’s your big takeaway? Seth: I think that one of the fascinating things is if you go back and look at The Jerusalem Post in the 1930s and in the area of the pre-state period especially, it’s fascinating to the degree to which the Post had reporters that were actually in the region who were going to places like Lebanon or Egypt, and they were getting stories from people there. And they were actually doing a lot of reporting also on the Arab community and what was then British Mandate. So obviously that shifted in the 1950s or ’60s, and then you get to the present day. I think that when you look back at those 90 years, what I found in traveling the region, the fascinating thing is that even countries with which Israel doesn’t have any relations, like Iraq, the times that I would travel there and spend time with the Kurds, for instance, a lot of people there are reading The Jerusalem Post. I think in the West, as Lahav said, there is a huge number of media. Everyone’s running to get tweets out and stories, and a lot of it kind of looks the same sometimes; but when you’re in the region,
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35 mins