About TheMarker Magazine

TheMarker Magazine

TheMarker Magazine is the monthly print magazine of TheMarker, the Israeli business news organisation founded in 1999 by journalist Guy Rolnik together with the Haaretz Group. Published from Tel Aviv, the magazine began in 2001, two years after TheMarker itself was incorporated and one year after its website launched in March 2000. Where TheMarker's daily newspaper and website follow markets and economic news day by day, the monthly magazine was created for longer analysis, major interviews and, above all, ranked lists. It is best known across Israel for two annual publications: the list of Israel's 100 most influential people and the list of Israel's 500 richest people, both of which draw considerable public and media attention every year they appear.

Founding of TheMarker and the decision to publish a magazine

TheMarker began as a digital venture. Guy Rolnik, who had started as a reporter in the Israeli army, became the economic reporter and editor for the army radio station, then joined Haaretz after his military service and, at twenty-four, became editor and head of its financial markets section. In 1999 he founded TheMarker with the Haaretz Group, joined by co-founders Eitan Avriel and Ido Pollak. The company launched in March 2000 what is described as the first business news website and the first online newsroom in Israel. A print monthly followed in 2001. That sequence — web first, magazine second, daily newspaper only in 2005 — is the reverse of the traditional newspaper path and explains the magazine's character. TheMarker Magazine was not a supplement inherited from an old newspaper. It was a deliberate print flagship for a young digital brand that wanted a durable, collectable product in which its biggest reporting projects could appear.

The timing also mattered. Israel's economy at the turn of the century was being reshaped by technology companies, privatisations, new capital market players and a growing concentration of ownership in large business groups. A monthly magazine had the space a website news cycle did not: it could reconstruct how a business group was built, compare the wealth of families across sectors, and argue, over many pages, that the structure of the economy itself was a public issue. From the beginning, the magazine was therefore both a business publication and a platform for TheMarker's wider editorial campaign about competition, concentration and the public interest.

The annual rankings: influence and wealth

TheMarker Magazine's two signature lists define its public identity. The 100 most influential people list attempts to map power in the Israeli economy — not only wealth, but the ability to shape prices, policy, employment and markets. It has placed business figures such as energy magnate Yitzhak Tshuva at the top, while also discussing ministers, regulators, union power, monopolies and social protest as forces that qualify or limit individual influence. In introducing one edition, TheMarker argued that large unions and interest groups could live comfortably alongside monopolies supplying basics from electricity to airport coffee, while also identifying people and movements it described as influencing for the better, including non-profit organisations and ministers associated with reforms in the cellular market and broadcasting. That mixture of ranking and argument is typical: the list is presented as journalism with a thesis, not as a neutral directory.

The 500 richest people list performs a different task. It estimates and orders personal and family wealth across Israeli business, from property and energy to technology, finance and retail. Together the two lists let the magazine tell an annual story about the Israeli economy in human form: who holds capital, who holds power, how the two overlap, and how both change. Rival publications, including Forbes Israel, publish their own wealth rankings, and the comparison between lists is itself part of Israeli business coverage. TheMarker's advantage is domestic depth — a Hebrew newsroom following Israeli companies, the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange and regulatory decisions throughout the year, rather than approaching Israeli wealth once a year from outside.

Relationship to the daily newspaper and website

The magazine cannot be understood apart from the rest of TheMarker. In 2005 the Haaretz daily's economic section was terminated and TheMarker was launched as a daily newspaper in its place. Following that relaunch, Haaretz's paid subscriptions rose significantly, reaching an all-time high of over 60,000 by the end of 2006, while advertising revenue from TheMarker's print edition grew by 50 percent compared with the period before the rebranding. In 2008 the print edition of TheMarker also became available as a stand-alone product. In 2007 TheMarker launched TheMarker Cafe, described as Israel's first social network for adults and the first launched by a news organisation. From 2003 it had already been organising business events under its own brand.

Within that system the monthly magazine occupies the reflective end. Daily TheMarker reports prices, deals, appointments and policy moves. The website adds data, commentary and reader community. The magazine steps back monthly to ask what the accumulated news means: which sectors are concentrating, which regulators are effective, which business models are durable, and which individuals genuinely shape outcomes. Its long interviews and profiles give business and public figures room to explain themselves at a length the daily cannot sustain, and its themed issues organise a subject — education networks, health, property, technology — into a single argued package, sometimes including comparative rankings of institutions as well as people.

Guy Rolnik and the campaigning tradition

TheMarker's founder shaped the magazine's editorial tradition. Rolnik led TheMarker's editorial and business operations for thirteen years as editor-in-chief and, after selling his shares to Haaretz six years after founding, became the group's deputy publisher. He holds a bachelor's degree in economics from Tel Aviv University and an MBA from the Tel Aviv and Northwestern Kellogg-Recanati programme, and attended Harvard programmes. In December 2013 he received the Sokolov Prize, Israel's leading journalism award, for founding TheMarker, changing Israeli media and public discourse, and influencing government and legislators to undertake significant changes in the structure of the Israeli economy. The prize jury wrote that Rolnik had emphasised tirelessly Israel's problematic economic structure, in which capital is concentrated in a small number of business entities connected to political and governmental power, and had exposed defects in that structure in order to secure a healthier, more equitable and more just economic system.

That citation describes the magazine's agenda precisely. TheMarker became known for prolonged journalistic campaigns, usually consisting of dozens of long-form essays, articles and analyses packed with data, designed to put an issue on the public agenda, attract the attention of the public, regulators and politicians, and build support for change. The concentration of economic power was the defining campaign, and it converged with the 2011 social protests over the cost of living, during which TheMarker's reporting argued that a small group of large business groups — families and holdings controlling banks and satellite companies across sectors — helped explain high prices. The monthly magazine, with its influence list naming those power holders each year, was a natural home for that argument in its most considered form.

Coverage and subject matter

Month by month, TheMarker Magazine covers the Israeli economy in the round: banking and capital markets, energy, telecommunications, property, retail, technology and start-ups, media itself, and the public sector that regulates them all. It publishes profiles of founders and executives, examinations of family business empires, assessments of ministers and regulators, and analysis of how global economic shifts reach a small, open economy. Because it belongs to the Haaretz Group, it sits within a news organisation known for independent and often critical journalism, and its business coverage shares that disposition: companies are examined for their market power and governance as well as their profits, and public policy is examined for who benefits from it.

The magazine also reflects the professionalisation of Israeli business journalism. Its rankings require research teams to gather company valuations, holdings and market data. Its campaigns require sustained legal and economic literacy. Its education and sector rankings apply the same comparative method to schools and networks, assessing measures such as matriculation and dropout outcomes. For readers — executives, investors, officials, journalists and students of the economy — the magazine functions as a monthly briefing on where power and money in Israel actually sit, written by reporters who cover those subjects daily in the newspaper and online.

Audience and position among Israeli financial titles

TheMarker Magazine competes in a small but intense financial media market. Globes, the veteran business daily founded in 1983 and based in Rishon LeZion, publishes its own magazines, including Lady Globes for women in business and, until 2016, Firma for the advertising and marketing industries. Calcalist serves a broad audience from the Yedioth Ahronoth group. Forbes Israel brings an international brand and its own wealth and under-thirty lists. Against those rivals, TheMarker Magazine's distinction is the combination of a monthly's depth with a daily newsroom's knowledge and an openly reformist editorial line. Its lists are not presented as celebrations alone; the influence list in particular is frequently critical of the people it ranks, examining the costs of concentrated power even while documenting it.

Headquarters context reinforces that identity. TheMarker operates from Tel Aviv within the Haaretz Group, described as Israel's primary source of business, finance, technology, real estate and economic policy information for audiences from individual investors to policymakers, and known for a critical perspective and influence on economic discourse. The magazine shares that newsroom and that reputation while speaking in a slower, more analytical register.

Format and publishing pattern

TheMarker Magazine is a monthly Hebrew print magazine, published in Tel Aviv as part of TheMarker's print offering alongside the daily newspaper. Its issues are built around a cover subject, supporting features, interviews, data presentations and the regular apparatus of a business monthly, with the annual influence and wealth issues standing out as the year's major editions. Material from the magazine also lives within TheMarker's wider digital presence, where magazine journalism sits alongside daily news, market data and commentary. No separate circulation figure for the magazine alone is published in the sources consulted for this profile, and the magazine is best understood as one component of TheMarker's combined print and digital readership rather than as a stand-alone title with independently reported numbers.

Significance and legacy

TheMarker Magazine's significance lies in what it helped normalise in Israeli journalism. It showed that a digital start-up could create a respected print monthly; that rankings of influence and wealth could be used as tools of accountability rather than only of celebration; and that a business magazine could sustain, over years, an argument about the structure of the national economy and see that argument enter protest movements, regulatory debate and prize citations. Guy Rolnik's Sokolov Prize recognised TheMarker as a whole, but the magazine is where TheMarker's method — name the power holders, publish the numbers, argue the consequences — appears in its fullest form. Published monthly from Tel Aviv since 2001, TheMarker Magazine remains the long-form face of Israel's most campaigning business news organisation, and its annual lists remain reference points for anyone trying to understand who holds wealth and influence in Israel and how that distribution changes over time.