Haaretz newspaper, Israel’s oldest Hebrew language daily, replaced for a day its staff reporters with thirty-one of the country’s finest authors and poets, according to the Jewish Daily Forward. Haaretz Editor-in-Chief Dov Alfon delivered the June 10 edition with reportage from both bestselling and up-and-coming writers. “We really tried to give a real newspaper,” Alfon said. Several pieces were light—“cute,” the Forward called them—including a stock market summary by cookbook and children’s-book author Avri Herling:

Everything’s okay. Everything’s like usual. Yesterday trading ended. Everything’s okay. The economists went to their homes, the laundry is drying on the lines, dinners are waiting in place… Dow Jones traded steadily and closed with 8,761 points, Nasdaq added 0.9% to a level of 1,860 points…. The guy from the shakshuka (an Israeli egg-and-tomato dish) shop raised his prices again….

Roni Somek dispatched about the weather with his “Summer Sonnet”: “Summer is the pencil/that is least sharp/in the seasons’ pencil case.” Printed alongside these less than weighty items were serious and thoughtful stories. Yoram Kaniuk, a novelist and current cancer patient, followed couples in a hospital cancer ward. “A woman walking with a cane brings her partner a cup of coffee with a trembling hand. The looks they exchange are sexier than any performance by Madonna and cost a good deal less,” Kaniuk wrote. “I think about what would happen if I were to get better… how I would live without the human delicacy to which I am witness?” For the cover, novelist David Grossman wrote about a children’s drug rehabilitation center in Jerusalem, ending it in flourish typical of his prose. “I lay in bed and thought wondrously how, amid the alienation and indifference of the harsh Israeli reality, such islands—stubborn little bubbles of care, tenderness and humanity—still exist.” The following day, Haaretz’s staff was back to routine. Yossi Melman, who writes on security and intelligence issues, emphasized that he liked the experiment, but said, “It would be very difficult to replace journalists with authors and run a newspaper. We are trained; we know how to do it. For them, you know, there is a tendency to elaborate.” Alfon disagrees. “I think it is a humility lesson for journalists,” he said. “Thirty-one writers decided, what are the real events of the day?” he said. “What is really important in their eyes? They wrote about it, and our priorities as journalists were suddenly shaken by this.”