About NoCamels

NoCamels

NoCamels is an English-language online news site covering Israeli innovation, technology, start-ups and research for a global audience. It was launched in December 2010 under the auspices of the Asper Institute for New Media Diplomacy at the Sammy Ofer School of Communications of the Interdisciplinary Center, Herzliya — today's Reichman University — and it describes its own launch publicly as occurring in 2011, the year its reporting reached a worldwide readership. Staffed in its founding model by student journalists trained by professional journalists, who travelled the country interviewing Israeli innovators, NoCamels set out to report breakthrough innovation from Israel — start-ups, scientific discoveries and medical research, social initiatives, environmental projects and innovative art and design — rather than the conflict coverage through which Israel is usually seen abroad. By the end of 2019 it had published close to ten thousand articles.

The site's name makes its editorial argument. The camel is the outdated stock image of Israel as a desert backwater; NoCamels announces that the Israel it reports is a different country, of laboratories, hospitals, engineering faculties and start-up offices. Its founding institute called it the world's leading news website on Israeli innovation, and it was built, unusually, inside a university, as both a newsroom and a teaching project in how a country tells its story through new media.

Launched by the Asper Institute at IDC Herzliya

NoCamels was launched in December 2010 under the auspices of the Asper Institute for New Media Diplomacy, according to the IDC's own magazine account of its founding, which describes NoCamels.com as an interactive, student-led news website dedicated to improving Israel's image and legitimacy in the world. The site itself, looking back over its first decade, says that NoCamels first launched in 2011 to cover breakthrough innovation from Israel for a global audience, and that over the following nine years it published close to ten thousand articles on Israeli start-ups, scientific discoveries and medical research, social initiatives, environmental projects and innovative art and design.

The Asper Institute for New Media Diplomacy was inaugurated on 9 June 2007 at IDC Herzliya's Sammy Ofer School of Communications, founded by the Asper Foundation of Canada to focus on the study and application of new media technologies to help tell Israel's story to the world. The institute is headed by Dr Noam Lemelshtrich Latar, the founding dean of the Sammy Ofer School, together with journalist and lecturer Anouk Lorie, its director. NoCamels was the institute's flagship public project, alongside IDC International Radio, and Lemelshtrich Latar is identified in the IDC's own account as the founder of NoCamels.

A student newsroom with professional training

NoCamels' founding production model was distinctive in world journalism: its reporters were students. The IDC magazine described two dozen student journalists from all of the schools at IDC being sent around the country to interview some of the leading individuals and companies focused on solving today's pressing global problems, producing stories in text, image and video, with several articles uploaded daily on the NoCamels rolling news site. The Asper Foundation's account adds that the site is staffed by IDC students trained by professional journalists, who tour the country to interview Israeli innovators, and later accounts note interns from universities in the United States working alongside the Israeli students.

The founding team photographed at the launch mixed students and staff — among them Anouk Lorie herself — under Lemelshtrich Latar's direction. The pedagogical purpose was explicit in the institute's mission: NoCamels was an applied course in new media diplomacy as much as a publication, teaching students to produce professional, appealing content about their own country that could be easily redistributed, and building what the institute described as a growing distribution network of eight hundred specialised international journalists and bloggers who linked to and distributed NoCamels content to their own audiences.

What NoCamels covers

NoCamels covers Israeli innovation across technology, medicine, science and the environment, together with the business of innovation itself. Its reporting ranges over start-ups and venture investment, university research, medical devices and pharmaceutical development, agricultural and water technology, clean energy, social and educational initiatives and innovative art and design. Media-database descriptions of the site summarise the same territory: breakthrough innovations and technology news from Israel, cutting-edge developments in big technology, scientific research, business and industry, healthcare and pharmaceuticals and agriculture, reported through private-sector announcements, data-driven analysis and government initiatives as well as original reporting.

The site's own choice of its most-read stories illustrates the range. Its single most searched article, from 2013, reported a Tel Aviv University study, led by Dr Shai Efrati of the Sackler Faculty of Medicine, showing that treatment with oxygen-rich air in hyperbaric chambers could restore neurological function in brain-damaged and post-stroke patients, in some cases years after the initial injury. Other heavily read stories covered wound-closure technology developed by Israeli scientists and already being applied in Israeli hospitals, a hand-held molecular scanner developed in Israel, and a new Israeli vaccine for cancer — medicine and applied science, reported accessibly, are the site's signature.

An academic, non-profit endeavour

NoCamels operates as a non-profit academic endeavour sponsored by the Asper Foundation and based at the Sammy Ofer School of Communications at IDC Herzliya, in the description of media databases that profile it. That structure separates it from Israel's commercial technology press: it was not founded to sell advertising against investor traffic, but to teach student journalists, to practise new media diplomacy and to place stories about Israeli solutions to global problems in front of readers who would never otherwise encounter them. Its founders' measure of success was redistribution — stories picked up, linked and republished by journalists and bloggers internationally — rather than page views alone.

The institute around it ran courses, seminars and workshops on creating effective new media advocacy campaigns, and NoCamels was the live demonstration of those lessons. The Asper Foundation, marking ten years of the institute in 2018, presented NoCamels and IDC International Radio as the institute's two flagship projects, through which it reached millions with news of Israel's achievements and successes; a foundation update likewise recorded NoCamels reaching millions of readers worldwide, including many from Arab and Muslim countries.

Innovation as a frame for a country

NoCamels was founded on an explicit diagnosis of Israel's image problem. The IDC's founding account of the site observed that the vast majority of news involving Israel concerned its conflicts, that a large portion of that coverage portrayed Israel negatively, and that a fragmented and biased image had formed in global perception — citing a BBC study of the period that grouped Israel with Iran, North Korea and Pakistan among the most disliked countries in the world. The institute's answer was not argument but counter-programming: a rolling news site whose every story was an Israeli attempt to solve a pressing problem, in health, water, energy, food or technology.

Critics of such projects sometimes group them with public diplomacy rather than journalism, and NoCamels has never hidden its mission: its own descriptions say it aims to shed light on innovative solutions rather than merely highlighting problems, and to inspire readers worldwide with stories of groundbreaking advancement. What makes it a news site rather than a brochure is its method — named reporters, interviews on location, reported detail and a decade of daily publication — applied within a declared editorial frame, much as a specialist business or science title works within its own.

NoCamels and the Israeli innovation ecosystem

The Israel NoCamels reports is a real and documented phenomenon: a small country with an unusually dense concentration of start-ups and research-and-development centres, whose universities, hospitals and technology companies produce a flow of scientific and commercial announcements far beyond what its population would predict. NoCamels systematised the coverage of that flow for foreign readers a year before much of the world's technology press built permanent Israeli coverage, and its archives — close to ten thousand articles by the end of 2019 — form one of the largest English-language records of Israeli innovation in the 2010s.

Individual stories show the site's position inside the ecosystem. Its reporters interviewed the engineers behind the FreeD 3D replay system used at the London Olympics and by American sports broadcasters, followed Israeli medical-technology companies into their first human trials, and recorded funding rounds and product launches across the start-up sector as they happened. Universities and hospitals used it as a channel to the international public; founders used it as evidence that their work had been noticed; and foreign journalists used it as a source of Israeli stories they could follow up.

Tel Aviv, Herzliya and the site's listing

NoCamels was created in Herzliya, at the IDC campus just north of Tel Aviv, and its subject — Israeli innovation — is concentrated in the Tel Aviv metropolitan area and the coastal technology corridor of which Herzliya is part. World media directories list the publication from Tel Aviv, in the Tel Aviv District, reflecting that metropolitan base and the city at the centre of the start-up economy it covers. Its student reporters toured the whole country for stories, but the newsroom's world — the university in Herzliya, the start-ups of Tel Aviv, the research institutes and hospitals of the centre — is the geography of Israel's innovation belt.

That geography matters to its identity. NoCamels is not a foreign bureau's view of Israel, nor a government portal; it is a product of an Israeli communications school, founded by a Canadian Jewish foundation's institute for new media diplomacy, staffed by Israeli and international students, and written in English for the world.

Place in the Israeli news landscape

Among English-language sites about Israel, NoCamels is the specialist of innovation, as other specialists cover politics, religion or community news. It overlaps with the technology coverage of Israel's English business press, but differs from it in audience and purpose: it writes for general international readers curious about Israeli ideas, not only for investors, and its archive is organised around solutions — health, environment, technology — rather than around markets. Media-relations databases describe it in those terms as a pioneering Israeli news platform dedicated to showcasing the country's technology and innovation ecosystem to a global audience, and as an encouragement to young journalists elsewhere to build similar platforms for their own countries.

Founded at the turn of the 2010s, when Israel's start-up reputation was becoming a global story, NoCamels gave that story a dedicated, English-language, Israel-based home. Its founding facts — December 2010, the Asper Institute, Dr Noam Lemelshtrich Latar and Anouk Lorie, student journalists touring the country — explain both its tone and its endurance as the cheerful, solutions-focused corner of Israeli news.