frgdr.com Blog

July 18, 2008 - Forward - US Newspaper

Shahar Golan was interviewed by Nathan Jeffay from The Jewish Daily Forward newspaper for an article about the upcoming visit of Barack Obama to Israel. Unbeknownst to him, Shahar presented the token opposing viewpoint to the general tone of the article which went as far as labelling him ‘an Israeli leftist’. The article featured the Obama graphics Shahar translated to Hebrew.

July 11, 2008 - Haaretz - Israeli Newspaper

Shahar Golan was interviewed by Raphael Ahren from Haaretz newspaper for an article about the 2008 US presidential election and the Obama poster he created in support of the Illinois senator.

September 5, 2007 - Reshet Alef - Israeli Radio

Shahar Golan was invited by Israel’s Channel A radio to be a guest on the program Writing for the Drawer hosted by Rona Gershon for an hour-long one-on-one chat following the recent publishing of his poetry book Almost Finished. You can listen to the recorded interview here:

I was interviewed for an article that was published today in the English edition of Haaretz newspaper, in regards to the 2008 US presidential election. Here are the relevant last two paragraphs:

As the U.S. presidential race reaches Israel, Hebrew-language campaigners try to choose words wisely

By Raphael Ahren

[...]

Some political items are created by people who can’t even vote in the United States. Obama supporter Shahar Golan, of Rehovot, crafted a poster with the Hebrew translation of the slogan “Change we can believe in.” After a smear campaign tried denouncing the Illinois senator as a Muslim, Golan felt he had to publicly declare his support for “Baruch Obama,” as he calls him. “As a born and bred Israeli, my interest in the U.S. elections is mainly because American presidents tend to influence the entire world,” the 31-year-old photographer and graphic designer said.” And since I cannot vote myself I create graphics that hopefully might call attention to a candidate worth voting for.” Currently, Golan is working on a new poster featuring a Hebrew version of Obama’s “Yes we can” slogan.

Golan knows that translations can be tricky. On his blog, he elaborated on his choice of words. “Translating ‘Change we can believe in’ proved to be somewhat of a challenge,” he muses, “as the Hebrew word for ‘we can’ (nuchal) is the exact one for ‘crook’ (nochel).” Not wanting to repeat past mistakes, he added that “even a hint of such subliminal connections can be bad.”

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A month ago I was contacted by Maariv, Israel’s second leading daily newspaper, in regards to a post I wrote the previous month. Feel free to pause here and refresh your memory by reading that post again. Basically, I was complaining about the paper’s international gossip guy who was reading material on PerezHilton.com, translating it to Hebrew, and passing it as his own without giving proper credit. As an avid Perez reader, the matter bothered me enough to conduct a four day inquiry which proved two thirds of all the items can be traced to the online gossip site.

The Maariv employee who contacted me wished to converse without attribution. Apparently he read my post and wanted to discuss the issues I raised. We carried a fifteen minutes long phone conversation about journalism, ethics and blogging, which was surprisingly pleasant and intelligent. I conveyed my notion of ‘giving credit where credit is due’, he talked about legal issues and made a distinction between exclusive and non-exclusive items. Overall I felt there was room for dialogue, and so I suggested ending each item with an acronym that will indicate the source, e.g. [ph] for a Perez Hilton item, [td] for a Tyler Durden item and so forth. I also suggested he put his arguments into writing so that I would publish them on his behalf at the end of the original post, but he politely declined.

We ended the conversation with my insinuating I’ll keep an open eye for any changes, and this is exactly what I did:
Little by little evidence piled to suggest people at Maariv took my critique seriously and the amount of credited blurbs was on the increase. The phrasing started to change from “Julia Roberts was seen…” to “Blogger Perez Hilton reports that Julia Roberts…”, and non-exclusive items sported phrases such as “American tabloids report” et cetera.

All and all, and to my genuine surprise, it seemed my little insignificant rant about credit giving had made a difference on Carlebach street, and while not to the extend that I suggested, someone did instruct the gossip guy to dispense credits more freely and to change the general tone of the segment.

Following are some visual aids from the previous weeks. The green boxes indicate the items that directly credited Perez Hilton, but to truly appreciate the change of tone you must be able to read Hebrew:

Two-Nil.

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Afterword:
Got a short email from Perez Hilton today (May 22, 2008) in regards to this post:
 

Thanks!
xoxo
P

The Israeli media is reporting an incident that happened yesterday, in which a man stabbed another man to death in an argument over a parking space. All the major media outlets mentioned the parking space in their headlines, in an attempt to give the frivolous killing a reason.

This approach is ubiquitous in the Israeli media and is something I just cannot comprehend: When a son killed his own mother – does it even matter that ‘it was because she did not buy him a computer‘? When a man was killed in a robbery – does it even matter that ‘the robber got away with only 100 Shekels‘?

Is there an amount of money that makes the killing justifiable or understandable in the public’s eye? Do carcasses tease each other six feet under, saying thing like ‘Hey, at least I was killed for a couple thousand bucks’?