About CTech

CTech

CTech is an English-language news site dedicated to Israeli technology, launched by the Israeli financial newspaper Calcalist in November 2017 and based in Tel Aviv, in the Tel Aviv District of Israel. Published at calcalistech.com, it was created to give international readers real-time, high-impact stories from Israel's innovation economy: comprehensive coverage of the country's start-up scene and of Israeli-linked companies traded on stock exchanges in the United States, Europe and Asia. Led at launch by editor-in-chief Orr Hirschauge, a former Wall Street Journal technology reporter, under Calcalist's founder and publisher Yoel Esteron, CTech translates the technology coverage of Israel's most widely circulated financial newspaper for the global audience that was already asking for it.

Israel's technology sector is reported worldwide, but most of that reporting is done from outside, by foreign correspondents and global technology titles visiting a story. CTech was built on the opposite premise: that the deepest coverage would come from the newsroom that already covered Israeli technology daily in Hebrew, republished and extended in the language its international subjects themselves use for business. It is a technology title, a business title and an Israel title at the same time.

Launched by Calcalist in November 2017

Calcalist announced the launch on 6 November 2017, presenting CTech as an online gateway to Israeli tech for readers around the world. The announcement set out the site's remit directly: alongside reports about some of the world's biggest technology companies, CTech would offer comprehensive coverage of Israel's start-up scene and of Israeli-linked companies traded on stock exchanges in the United States, Europe and Asia. Company profiles of CTech date its founding to the summer of 2017, the period in which the site was being prepared, with the former Wall Street Journal reporter Orr Hirschauge appointed editor-in-chief in July of that year.

The demand that produced CTech was described by its publisher at launch. Readers in New York, Silicon Valley, Europe, India, China, Australia and other countries had expressed interest in Calcalist's exclusive content, and Calcalist had already held technology conferences in San Francisco, New York and London in response. The website was the permanent form of that outreach: instead of occasional conferences abroad, the coverage itself would now travel.

Calcalist, the parent newspaper

CTech's parent, Calcalist, is a Hebrew-language financial newspaper first published in 2008. At CTech's launch, Calcalist described itself, citing a July report by the London-headquartered market research firm Kantar Media, as the most widely circulated financial newspaper in Israel. Calcalist publishes most of its articles and reports on its Hebrew website, together with breaking news updates throughout the day and exclusive digital features, and CTech sits alongside that operation as its English-language technology arm.

The relationship gives CTech two assets a start-up technology site would struggle to build. The first is access: Calcalist's reporters already interview Israel's founders, investors, executives and ministers as part of the national business conversation, and CTech's team of international journalists complements that existing talent, in the launch announcement's phrase, rather than replacing it. The second is context: Israeli technology news is also capital-markets news, regulatory news and sometimes security news, and a financial newspaper's newsroom is equipped to follow all of those threads at once.

Yoel Esteron and Orr Hirschauge

CTech is led by publisher Yoel Esteron, the founder of Calcalist. Announcing the launch, Esteron said that by launching CTech, Calcalist took its leading coverage of Israeli technology one step further, that no other publication supplied readers interested in this hotbed of innovative technologies with the width and depth of coverage offered by Calcalist, and that the newspaper embraced the local technology community as a growth engine for Israel's economy and would from then on also be accessible to international audiences. Esteron's own career spans Israeli media: he was managing editor of Haaretz for a decade, founded the Haaretz English edition in print and online in 1997 as a joint venture with the International Herald Tribune, and later served as managing editor of Yedioth Ahronoth, before founding Calcalist. His earlier creation of an English edition for an Israeli newspaper is the clear precedent for CTech.

The founding editor, Orr Hirschauge, was appointed editor-in-chief in July 2017. Hirschauge had been a technology reporter for The Wall Street Journal, experience that shaped the site's intended readership: investors, executives and technology professionals in the United States and other markets who follow Israeli companies as investments, competitors, partners and acquisition targets, and who were already reading about them in the global financial press. Under Hirschauge, CTech's early output mixed breaking funding and acquisition news with reported features, interviews and analysis in the style of an international business title.

What CTech covers

CTech's coverage follows the whole life cycle of Israeli technology. It reports start-ups raising their first rounds, venture-capital funds raising and deploying money, established companies issuing shares abroad, acquisitions of Israeli firms by global technology groups, and the public markets' treatment of Israeli-linked companies in the United States, Europe and Asia. Its stated subject areas in company profiles include cybersecurity, autonomous driving, artificial intelligence, cryptocurrency, 3D printing and homeland security — a list that maps closely onto the sectors for which Israeli technology is best known internationally.

The site's sections and tags from its first years show the same breadth in practice: entrepreneurship, investment, crowdfunding, start-ups and technology, with reporters filing on subjects from equity crowdfunding regulation in the Knesset to the effect of United States tax reform on Israeli companies, from venture funds raised in Tel Aviv to Israeli research on chip-design security flaws. Daily roundups of Israeli technology news gathered the day's developments for international readers who could not follow the Hebrew press, a service function as important as any single story.

Mind the Tech and the conference business

CTech is inseparable from Calcalist's Mind the Tech conferences, the international events around which its audience was first assembled. Calcalist has hosted Mind the Tech in New York, San Francisco and London as well as in Tel Aviv, describing the events as an effort to reach members of the business community in the United States and Europe who are interested in Israel. The March 2018 Mind the Tech conference in New York, held for the second time and organised with Bank Leumi, featured speakers including former United States senator Joe Lieberman and former CIA director James Woolsey, and hosted a start-up competition run by the venture firm Jerusalem Venture Partners whose winner was eligible for a one-million-dollar investment.

CTech covered those conferences as news, reported their sessions, and gave their audience a publication to read between events. The combination — a daily English website, a Hebrew financial newspaper and an international conference series — is a single strategy in three forms: presenting the Israeli technology economy to the world as one continuous story, and CTech is the form that publishes every day.

An English voice for a Hebrew newsroom

CTech belongs to a small group of English-language Israeli technology publications, but its position among them is distinctive. Independent English technology sites in Israel were generally founded as English publications from the start; CTech was founded as the English technology arm of the country's leading financial newspaper, with a Hebrew newsroom behind it. Company descriptions of CTech make the same point in their own words: it combines the investigative know-how of a team of international reporters with the deep on-the-ground access of Israel's leading business newspaper, offering local insight with a global perspective to industry executives, investors and technology enthusiasts.

That structure also explains its news values. CTech does not cover Israel generally — politics, diplomacy and conflict appear where they touch technology, markets and business, as with tax reform, defence technology and government innovation policy — and it does not cover technology generally, except where the world's biggest companies act in or on Israel. Its territory is the intersection, covered continuously: everything Israeli technology does in the world, and everything the world does with Israeli technology.

Tel Aviv and the innovation economy

CTech is based in Tel Aviv, the centre of Israel's technology industry as well as of its financial press. The Tel Aviv District and the surrounding coastal plain hold the offices of Israel's venture funds, its start-ups' headquarters, the Israeli arms of global technology companies' research centres and the conferences at which the sector meets. A technology news site that must be able to reach a founder, an investor and a ministry official in the same day is, in Israel, a Tel Aviv publication by necessity as much as by choice.

The city is also the natural home of its parent. Calcalist is part of the Yedioth Ahronoth group's Tel Aviv-centred publishing world, and CTech's journalists work inside the business-media culture of the city: close to the stock exchange whose listed technology companies it follows, to the banks that co-sponsor its conferences, and to the start-up scene whose announcements fill its news pages.

CTech's place among Israeli English-language media

English-language media in Israel serve several publics: diplomats and foreign correspondents, the Jewish diaspora, tourists and investors. CTech addresses the last of those most directly, and its founding announcement was explicit that the audience already existed in New York, Silicon Valley, Europe, India, China and Australia. Where general English news sites from Israel explain the country to the world, CTech explains one sector of it — the sector foreign audiences most consistently seek out — in the depth that a financial newspaper can sustain.

Since 2017, that sector has passed through a full cycle of boom, global technology expansion, pandemic-era growth and correction, and CTech has remained the English address of the newsroom that covers it daily in Hebrew. Its founding proposition has not changed: Israeli technology is a global story that deserves a specialist publication of record, written in Israel, in English, by the journalists of the country's leading financial paper.

Why CTech matters

Directory listings of Israeli media classify CTech straightforwardly, as an English-language news site dedicated to Israeli technology news, launched in November 2017 by Calcalist. The significance behind the classification is that CTech institutionalised something that previously happened informally. Before it, international knowledge of Israeli technology deals depended on press releases, foreign coverage and occasional translation; after it, there was a daily, English, Israeli source of record, edited by a former Wall Street Journal reporter and published by the founder of Calcalist, against which other coverage could be checked.

For the purposes of a world media directory, CTech is therefore recorded as a Tel Aviv-based online newspaper in English, a technology and business title within the Calcalist and Yedioth media family, and the principal English-language window into the reporting of Israel's most widely circulated financial newspaper on the industry that drives much of its economy.