About N12

N12

N12 is the Hebrew-language news website and app of the Israeli News Company, the company that produces the news programmes broadcast on Keshet 12. Launched in February 2020 as a dedicated digital service, N12 publishes at n12.co.il and is part of the Keshet Media Group digital portfolio, managed in product and technology terms within the Mako group. The News Company behind it, founded in 1993 as Channel 2 News and headquartered at Neve Ilan in the Jerusalem corridor, is commonly considered Israel's most highly rated news broadcaster, and N12 is the online extension of that television news operation.

The News Company behind the site

To understand N12, it is necessary to understand its parent newsroom. The Israeli News Company — Hevrat HaHadashot, formally the Israeli News Company Ltd — was founded on 4 November 1993 by Eilon Shalev and Shalom Kital, as Channel 2 began broadcasting. It produced news for Channel 2's franchisees for more than two decades, and when Channel 2 closed in November 2017 it continued with Keshet as Keshet 12 News. The company is wholly owned by Keshet Media Group. Its headquarters are at Neve Ilan, in the Jerusalem corridor, the studio complex from which Channel 12's news programmes are broadcast. Its long-serving chief executive in recent listings is Avi Weiss, its chairman Yehuda Lancry, and its best-known presenter is Yonit Levi, the prime-time news anchor. Company listings have put its workforce at about 350 people, excluding its Russian-language operation. N12 is this organisation's digital front door.

Launch in February 2020

Before 2020, Channel 12's news content lived online mainly inside Mako, Keshet's general portal, and earlier still on the Keshet and Reshet websites, where the News Company had begun web activity as far back as 2008, including webpages on the franchisees' sites from September of that year. The launch of N12 in February 2020, as both a website and an application, separated hard news into its own brand for the first time. The timing, just before the COVID-19 pandemic drove news consumption sharply upward, proved consequential, and trade reporting at the time noted that the new N12 site quickly drew users away from older portals such as Walla!, which was then in need of investment. N12's name states its proposition plainly: the news of Channel 12, native to digital.

What N12 publishes

N12 provides real-time news updates and multimedia content across politics, security and defence, crime, finance and the economy, consumer affairs, sport and culture. It serves as a hub for digital reporting by the News Company's journalists and for live streaming and on-demand viewing of News 12 television programmes, including the main evening edition, Studio Friday (Ulpan Shishi) and Meet the Press. The reporter's byline is central to the service: Channel 12's correspondents and analysts — among the most recognisable journalists in Israel — publish digital updates and analysis under their own names, and the app delivers breaking-news alerts directly to users' phones. In form, N12 blends three things: a continuously updated text news wire written by a television newsroom, the video of the broadcasts themselves, and the personal brands of the channel's presenters and correspondents.

Relationship to Mako and the Keshet portfolio

N12 is part of the Mako group, which manages the product and technology for the service, and its staff email conventions run through the Mako domain — a reminder that the site was built by Keshet's existing digital organisation rather than from scratch. Keshet Media Group's own company descriptions list the portfolio in one breath: Mako, the independent entertainment portal; N12, the app and website of Israel's leading news company, which broadcasts on Keshet 12; tech12, a technology-industry news hub; and the 12+ streaming service. Within that portfolio, the division of labour is clear. Mako carries entertainment, lifestyle and general content; N12 carries news. The arrangement mirrors the television structure, in which the News Company is a distinct organisation inside the Keshet group rather than a department of the entertainment channel.

Audience and usage

N12's audience is the Hebrew-speaking Israeli public that already watched Channel 12 news on television, transferred to phones and browsers. App-store rankings in Israel have consistently placed the N12 app among the country's leading news applications. Usage data from the fourth quarter of 2023, a period dominated by the outbreak of war in October, illustrated its scale: the N12 app recorded a peak of about 28,000 downloads in a single week in early October 2023 and an active-user peak of roughly 143,600, ending the quarter at about 113,200 active users, according to Sensor Tower figures reported at the time. Traffic rankings have fluctuated since: Similarweb data reported in October 2026 showed N12 dropping five places to 23rd among Israeli sites, exiting the top twenty for the first time in three years — a reminder that even leading news brands compete continuously with global platforms for attention. Company databases list N12's operation at between 51 and 200 employees, with offices associated with both Tel Aviv and the News Company's Neve Ilan base.

Editorial character

N12 inherits the editorial character of Channel 12 News: mainstream, Zionist, security-focused Israeli journalism, built around the evening bulletin and around a small number of senior correspondents whose reporting routinely sets the political agenda. Its digital publishing follows the television newsroom's strengths — speed on security and political developments, access to official sources, and prominent analysis — delivered in the shorter, alert-driven forms of an app. Because the same journalists appear on television and on N12, the site's reporting and the channel's broadcasts reinforce each other: a story broken by a Channel 12 correspondent in the evening edition is expanded online, and digital reporting during the day feeds the evening programme.

Place in the Israeli news market

N12's launch completed a structural change in Israeli online news. Until 2020, the leading Hebrew news sites were newspaper portals — Ynet and Walla! — plus Keshet's mixed portal Mako. N12 gave the country's most-watched television news operation a dedicated digital brand of its own, and its rapid growth was cited in trade reporting as a factor weakening older portals. It competes today with Ynet, Walla, Mako, Haaretz, Kan News, Channel 14's Now14 and the newspaper sites, in a market where television news brands and newspaper brands now meet on the same phone screens.

Organisation and ownership

N12 is wholly within the Keshet Media Group: the News Company that produces its journalism is wholly owned by Keshet, and the service is operated as part of the group's digital portfolio alongside Mako. Its formal headquarters follow the News Company to Neve Ilan in the Jerusalem District, while its product, technology and commercial functions sit with the Mako group in Tel Aviv. The website address is n12.co.il, in Hebrew, with no separate English edition; its international significance is indirect, as the English-language reporting of other outlets frequently follows stories first reported by Channel 12's correspondents and published on N12.

Significance

In less than a decade, N12 has become the reference example of a television newsroom going digital-first in Israel. It took a news company founded in 1993 for a shared commercial channel, survived that channel's abolition and rebirth as Keshet 12, and in February 2020 gave it a website and app that publish in real time, stream its programmes and carry its correspondents' reporting to an audience measured in the hundreds of thousands of app users. For readers in Israel, N12 is simply where Channel 12 news lives when the television is off — and that habitual position is precisely what the site was built to achieve.

The app is an important part of that position. Israeli news consumption is heavily mobile and alert-driven, particularly during security events, and N12 was designed from its February 2020 launch as a website and application together rather than as a desktop site later adapted to phones. Its presence among Israel's leading news applications in store rankings, and the download and active-user surges recorded during the October 2023 war period, show how completely the News Company's audience had adopted the service within less than four years of its launch.