Kinda reminds me of the time Robert Frost was a technical writer for a day :-)
The Thread Not Traversed
TWO threads diverged in a yellow stack,
And sorry I could not traverse so
And be one parser, long I stood
And looped through one as long as I could
To where it spawned in the overflow;
Then invoked the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the faster stats,
Because it was hashed and wanted wear;
Though as for that the data there
Had run them into third normal form,
And both that session equally lay
In objects no instance had trodden class.
Oh, I kept the version for another day!
Yet knowing how code leads on to code,
I doubted if I should ever unit test.
I shall be documenting this with a sigh
Somewhere many transactions hence:
Two threads diverged in a stack, and I—
I took the one less traversed by,
And that has caused the site to fly.
Has anyone got a link to any of the cited articles? I haven't had luck Googling their English website haaretz.com or the Hebrew website haaretz.co.il .
It was done as part of "Book Week", which is celebrated every year around this time in Israel. They got some of Israel's leading writers like David Grossman and Etgar Keret to take part and some of the stories are excellent.
My favorite touch was the weather report, which contains a poem for summer written by one of Israel's best known poets, Roni Somek. The weather reports talks of hot & humid early summer weather, and he writes (roughly translated):
Summer is the least
sharp pencil of the seasons' box
I write with it
a love letter
to the tailor who cut off
the women's blouses
and skirts
a few inches
of winter.
This year too, perhaps
it will be hot in the valleys
The authors didn't really write the whole newspaper, just some magazine-style reports and some of regular features - weather report, TV critic, letters to the editor (by another poet) etc. News, sports etc items were still there, written by the regular reporters.
(BTW, in general, Haaretz in English is quite different and better quality than the Hebrew version. This is perhaps why Haaretz is held in much higher regard outside Israel.)
What makes the English Haaretz better? I don't speak Hebrew but I remember comparing the (paper) English and Hebrew editions of Haaretz and not noticing much difference. I can't specifically recall looking past the front page though.
My tour guide in Israel was a former Haaretz English translator and he nitpicked several things in my English copy, saying their translators had gotten sloppy since he left.
In the Hebrew version, every other article contains spelling mistakes and glaring errors - and that's before the simply poor, Techcrunch-like level of reporting standards. Due to financial issues and internal power struggles, Haaretz lost many of its experienced writers and editors in the last decade and is unable to attract new talent when it pays sub-minimum wage salaries.
(This is true for most of Israeli media, btw, it's just that Haaretz is for some reason held at higher regard by outsiders)
All this seems to affect the English version less, probably because it contains a small number of editors/writers relative to the Hebrew one, and they tend to have learned their craft in the US/UK, which still have far better journalism standards than most of the world.
