Dear Jewish Philadelphia:
We are the new owners of The Jewish Exponent, but you already know us.
For the past seven years we have had the privilege of working with the Jewish Publishing Group and the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia in the weekly publication of The Jewish Exponent. You know our editors and reporters. We hope you have enjoyed our work.
When we learned of the possibility of acquiring the Jewish Exponent — an iconic publication with a rich history and an impressive reputation — we jumped at the opportunity. And we are very pleased that we succeeded. We look forward to serving the Greater Philadelphia Jewish community and to carrying on the tradition of excellence that has been the hallmark of the Jewish Exponent since its first edition in 1887.
Our group, Mid-Atlantic Media, has been in the Jewish publishing business for about a dozen years. Although the publishing business is challenging, we see Jewish communal media as a means of building, promoting and strengthening Jewish communal life in each of the cities in which we operate.
Our goal is to help build community. And we try to do that with our communal publications. In addition to our work with the Jewish Exponent, we own and publish the Washington Jewish Week and Baltimore Jewish Times, and provide select media services for Pittsburgh’s Jewish Chronicle and Phoenix Jewish News. In each city in which we operate we focus on promoting local Jewish institutions, organizations, leaders and everyday people who make up the rich mixture of our diverse and far-flung Jewish communities. And through the economies of scale, which enables us to consolidate many of our back-office and business functions, we have established a model of operation that has enabled us to grow.
You can expect to see some modest changes in the appearance, focus and content of your weekly Jewish Exponent. In addition to a change in format — which you will see with this edition — we are also moving toward a more local focus for our stories and reporting.
Under this approach, you will hopefully see local stories not covered elsewhere, and highlights of people, events and institutions that are unique to Jewish Philadelphia. We will feature a weekly Synagogue Spotlight, introduce you to people in our You Should Know column and highlight communal leaders and up and coming personalities in a variety of feature articles. We will also proudly include a weekly Federation page, where the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia will keep you up to date on events, stories and accomplishments of Philadelphia’s premier Jewish communal organization.
We will also feature weekly editorials and diverse op-ed pieces which we hope will be of interest to you — even if you won’t always agree with all of the views expressed. And regardless of whether you agree or disagree with us, we hope you will let us know how we are doing.
We welcome your input, value your opinion and look forward to hearing from you through letters, website posts, emails to our editor and staff reporters, and your participation on our Facebook, Twitter and Instagram pages.
