About Mynet

Mynet

Mynet is a Hebrew-language local-news website network in Israel, operating at mynet.co.il under the slogan Kol ma shekoreh ba'ir shelcha — everything that is happening in your city. It is the digital home of Israel's local press: a single national portal divided into local sites for individual cities and regions, each publishing the municipal politics, sport, culture, education, health, property, leisure and food news of its own community. For most of its life Mynet was operated by Yedioth Tikshoret, the local-newspaper arm of the Yedioth Ahronoth Group, from the group's home in Rishon LeZion, and it remains the largest organised local-news network in the country.

Launched on 30 July 2008 inside Ynet

Mynet began operating on 30 July 2008. It was initiated and founded by the journalist Ilan Itzhayik, one of the founders of Ynet, together with Yael Admoni, the editor-in-chief of Yedioth Tikshoret. The name is a blend of the words my and Ynet, expressing the founding idea: a personal news service that would bring residents updates and reports from their own local surroundings, in the same way that Ynet brought them the national agenda. At first the site was presented on the platform of a sub-channel of Ynet, which concentrated reports from the different cities. In its first three years the site's editor-in-chief was the journalist Noam Reshef; when he left in 2011, Guy Beniovich was appointed editor-in-chief in his place.

The timing was part of a wider group strategy. In 2008 Ynet and Yedioth Tikshoret joined in cooperation and established local channels inside Ynet under the Mynet name, focused on local news and including, alongside continuous news updates by the site's reporters, articles from all of Yedioth Tikshoret's local newspapers. Mynet was therefore born as the meeting point of two assets: Ynet's national digital reach and the local papers' street-level reporting in dozens of communities.

Yedioth Tikshoret, the local chain behind it

To understand Mynet, its parent chain matters. Yedioth Tikshoret Ltd is the local-news company of the Yedioth Ahronoth Group, publisher of the group's local newspapers and of Mynet. It was founded in 1989 with the aim of establishing a Yedioth local-newspaper network that would compete with the successful network of the Haaretz Group, the Schocken network, which held popular local papers including Kol Ha'ir in Jerusalem and Ha'ir in Tel Aviv; until then Yedioth had operated several local papers independently, without central management. Nir Hefetz served as the network's editor-in-chief between 2000 and 2006, and Raanan Bar Tal was its chief executive from 2005 to 2017, succeeded that year by Liat Sharon.

In July 2007, a year before Mynet launched, the chain rebranded: every local paper took the word Yedioth at the start of its name, in a design identical to that of the Yedioth Ahronoth masthead, to strengthen the local papers' bond with the parent newspaper, and some papers were split so that each would focus on a narrower area. In the same year as Mynet's launch, 2008, Yedioth Tikshoret also won the tender to produce a newspaper for the kibbutz movement, replacing the two kibbutz weeklies Hakibbutz and Hadaf Hayarok, which had closed. Mynet's kibbutz site, listed in its network to this day, is a descendant of that print relationship.

Becoming an independent portal in 2017

In 2017 Mynet underwent a process of rebranding and redesign and became an independent news site in its own right. Under it operated 19 local news sub-sites, and it ran its own system of reporters, editors and photographers rather than depending on the parent portal. Ynet's own reference summary records the same transition from the other side: in 2008 Ynet launched the Mynet site, which operates as a separate system with its own reporters and editors, with local news sites under it providing continuous news updates alongside articles from all of Yedioth Tikshoret's local newspapers.

In 2019 the network launched a new application, developed by Yedioth Technologies, the digital arm of Yedioth Ahronoth, making the site's content accessible to mobile-phone users. The app, like the site, is organised by place: the reader's news is the news of their own city, not a national feed with local stories mixed in.

The network of local sites

As of 2026, 20 local sites operate in the Mynet network, run by editors and reporters across the country. The list itself is a map of Israeli local journalism: Mynet Jerusalem; Mynet Krayot; Mynet Beersheba and the Negev; Mynet Haifa; Mynet Petah Tikva; Mynet Rishon LeZion; Mynet Rehovot; Mynet Netanya; Mynet Holon; Mynet Hadera; Mynet Bat Yam; Mynet HaEmek; Mynet Kfar Saba; Mynet Modi'in; Mynet Herzliya; Mynet Raanana; Mynet Hod Hasharon; Mynet Rosh HaAyin; Mynet Ashdod; and Mynet Kibbutz. An earlier count, as of 2023, recorded 19 local sites operated by about 30 editors and reporters nationwide; the network has since been listed at 20 with the addition of the Ashdod site.

The Rishon LeZion desk and the local newsrooms

The central news desk of Mynet was located at the Yedioth Ahronoth house in Rishon LeZion, and most of the network's sites were edited from there. Two sites were exceptions, operated from newsrooms in the cities themselves: Mynet Jerusalem and Mynet Krayot. That structure — a central desk in Rishon LeZion, satellite newsrooms in Jerusalem and the Krayot, and reporters in the field everywhere else — is the operating model that lets a single brand publish genuinely local news at national scale.

What Mynet covers

The site provides local news across a wide range of subjects: politics, sport, culture, education, health, real estate, gossip, leisure and food. In this context local politics means the city council, the mayor and the planning committee rather than the Knesset; local sport means the town's football and basketball clubs; and the property section follows the housing market street by street. During the year the site also launches a number of large projects placing emphasis on promoting small and independent businesses, a natural extension of a network whose print ancestors lived from local advertising and community ties.

This breadth at city level is what distinguishes Mynet from both kinds of competitor. National portals such as Ynet and Walla! cover a city when national news happens there; purely independent local sites cover one community with no central backing. Mynet's proposition, encoded in its slogan, is systematic: everything happening in your city, professionally edited, under one national local brand.

Print closures and new ownership after 2025

Mynet's recent history records the pressure on Israel's local print press, and the network's survival of it. Yedioth Tikshoret operated the site and the application until the end of 2025. In November 2025 the management announced the closure of the print local newspapers at the end of that year. Despite that announcement, the activity of the Mynet local-news network continued, and Alon Levy was appointed its editor-in-chief in 2026. The site and the application then passed from Yedioth Tikshoret to a group of local business owners. The sequence matters: the printed weeklies that had supplied Mynet's original content were closed, but the digital network they gave birth to was judged worth continuing under new ownership, with a new editor-in-chief, rather than closed with them.

Place in Israeli local media

Israel has a long local-press tradition, in which weekly papers served individual cities with a closeness no national daily could match, and the great newspaper groups built rival chains to control it — Schocken's network on one side and, from 1989, Yedioth Tikshoret on the other. Mynet is the digital heir of the Yedioth side of that contest. It converted a chain of printed weeklies into a network of 20 continuously updated local websites, kept the central-desk discipline of the print era, and added the app and portal economics of the Yedioth group's digital arm.

For readers, the result is the default address for Israeli municipal news online: a single site where a resident of Modi'in, Ashdod, Hadera or the Emek can read only their own community's news, produced by named local reporters, under a brand owned until the end of 2025 by the country's largest media group and continued since by local owners. In a media market dominated by national portals, Mynet's endurance — from a Ynet sub-channel in July 2008, through independence in 2017, to survival beyond the closure of its own print parents — makes it one of the most instructive institutions in Israeli online news.