DeBuzzer (דה באזר)

» see debuzzer.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Two sports journalists, Ronen Dorfan and Eitan Bakerman, started DeBuzzer in August 2010 under a title that translates as a content home for sport. The structure was a blogyah, a collection of separate blogs, each written by a working sports journalist. The subject list is what made it interesting: alongside the football everybody covered, it ran motor racing and ice hockey, which in Israeli sports culture are considered esoteric to the point of eccentricity. American football got a blog too. Ze'ev Avrahami, Gil Sheli, Ariel Greizes, Beni Tavori, and Gur Ilany were among the regulars. Guest pieces from readers ran under a heading called buzz.

The editors cared unusually much about the comments. Rather than dump replies into the undifferentiated talkback pile that Israeli news sites used, DeBuzzer threaded them, so you could see who was answering whom and in which argument. The Hebrew Wikipedia article makes a claim about the result that I have not seen made about any other comment section: that the discussions frequently became as interesting as the article they hung off, and sometimes more so.

Recognition came fast. Time Out Tel Aviv named it the best sports site in its best-of issue, and Yedioth Ahronoth's money supplement recommended it in December 2010, four months after launch. On the back of that it became a content supplier to the Nana 10 news site and to the broadcaster Charlton.

~ the case file ~

~ the partner years ~

In May 2012 the blogs were folded into the website of Sport Channel, Israel's sports broadcaster, in a content partnership Globes covered at the end of that month. From March 2013 Beni Tavori, one of the site's own writers, took over as editor-in-chief and manager. In November 2013 the Sport Channel arrangement ended and DeBuzzer went back to being independent.

Independent, in this case, meant funded by reader donations. The infobox lists its revenue source as reader funding, flatly, in the same field where a commercial site would name an ad network. From late 2013 to 2019 a group of professional sports journalists wrote about ice hockey for Israelis and got paid by whoever felt like paying.

~ moving house ~

On 22 September 2019 Dorfan posted a piece at debuzzer.com/dorfan/96923 titled, in Hebrew, moving house, stay with us. DeBuzzer stopped operating as a website. Everything would go out on social media from then on, mostly Facebook, and the reason given was exposure: more people would see the posts there. Nitzan Choresh was made editor of whatever DeBuzzer was now. The site itself, the announcement said, would carry on existing as a digital archive.

Both halves of that decision have aged. The Facebook group is still there, which is why Hebrew Wikipedia now opens by describing DeBuzzer in the present tense as an Israeli Facebook group about sport, and why this grave is specifically for the website rather than the name. The archive did not survive. debuzzer.com today serves a page announcing that Debuzzer.com is for sale, premium domain. Nine years of Hebrew writing about motor racing and ice hockey, including the note explaining where it was all going, is now reachable only through the Internet Archive.

~ the distance ~

I have no Hebrew and no particular claim on Israeli sports writing, so what draws me to this one is the shape of the exit rather than the content. The move it made in 2019 is the move a lot of small sites I did read in Turkish made in the same years, and the logic was always identical: the audience is on Facebook, the page views are on Facebook, keeping your own domain is paying rent on a building nobody walks past. It was true. It was also a trade of a permanent address for a rented feed, and when the trade goes wrong the thing you lose is the back catalog.

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