LIVE, FROM NEW YORK, 'THE JERUSALEM POST'

By: Wayne Robins Unusual Program Offers Home Delivery


Every day, readers in the New York metropolitan area have a
bumper crop of choices for newspaper home delivery: the Daily
News, Newsday, the New York Post, The New York Times,
and a host of suburban papers. On Fridays, there is now one more
paper available on their doorsteps: The Jerusalem Post.

Israel's leading English-language newspaper, a part of the
Hollinger International Inc. chain, launched March 24 home
subscriptions of its two-section Friday paper (a broadsheet news
section and a tabloid weekend magazine) in metro New York, New
Jersey, and Connecticut. It promises 6 a.m. delivery in most
areas. With 2,200 subscribers, Jerusalem Post Publisher
Tom Rose considers the project enough of a success that the paper
is eyeing other American metropolitan areas with large Jewish
communities for possible expansion.

"It's a classic case of your customers knowing what they want,"
Rose told E&P in phone interview from his Jerusalem
office. The frequent travel by Israeli and American Jews between
the two countries created a demand for the Post in the New
York region. "Our customers were asking us why they couldn't read
in New York what their friends and relatives in Israel were
reading the same day."

Printing, distributing, and delivering a same-day newspaper
halfway around the globe may seem counterintuitive in the
Internet era. But it is the Internet, of course, that makes
printing the Friday Jerusalem Post possible in New York.

"To paraphrase Mark Twain, 'news of the old economy's death has
been greatly exaggerated," Rose said. "Interestingly, after the
investment of hundreds of millions of dollars in new electronic
delivery technologies, newspapers themselves remain the core of
the newspaper industry."

Pages are laid out in Jerusalem and posted on a file transfer
protocol site. Downloaded pages are plated, then printed. It
doesn't matter whether the source is more than an ocean away or
just a few miles. "While the Jerusalem Post is produced in
Jerusalem and printed in New York, the age of the Internet and T-
1 lines allow us to offer products in a much more economical
way," said Stephen Hastings, the Chicago-based director of
international circulation for the Post.

The Friday edition of the Post is also called the Weekend
Edition and is the week's most comprehensive, combining the
leisure package of a typical American weekend section with the
news perspective and analysis of a solid U.S. Sunday paper. The
reason is that business in the state of Israel comes to a virtual
halt from Friday sundown through Saturday for the Jewish Sabbath.
So Sunday in Israel tends to be just another weekday.

The subscription runs $21.90 for three months, about $1.80 an
issue. Whether the Post's strategy works will depend on
how many of the current 2,200 in the New York area re-subscribe
after an initial discount period for which they pay about $1 an
issue for 17 weeks.

"If we couldn't make money, we simply wouldn't do it," Tom Rose
said. "Frankly, in our small realm of the Jewish world and those
interested in Israel and the Middle East, we are the clear market
leader. On the other hand, the exposure and availability of a new
same day product in New York, and subsequently, we hope, in other
key North American markets can't help but strengthen and enhance
our position."



Wayne Robins (wrobins@editorandpublisher.com) is an associate editor covering new media for E&P.



Copyright 2001, Editor & Publisher.