Oct. 7 reshaped US Jewish media as trust in mainstream outlets eroded, media executive tells i24NEWS

The October 7 massacre fundamentally changed the relationship between American Jews and Jewish media, driving demand for hard news while widening distrust of mainstream outlets, a leading Jewish media executive told i24NEWS.

Ami Eden, president of the American Jewish Press Association and CEO and executive editor of 70 Faces Media, said Jewish outlets had already been moving beyond traditional news coverage in the years before October 7, increasingly seeking to help audiences connect with their Jewish identity.

What changed after the attack, he said, was that the news itself became inseparable from that identity.

“It’s not only that people became hungrier for news,” Eden told American View. “The reason they became hungrier is because what was happening in the news was impacting their Jewish identity.”

That shift has prompted Jewish media organizations to devote more attention and resources to hard news and commentary, Eden said, while navigating deep disagreements within American Jewish communities over Israel, politics and the war.

Those challenges have been compounded by changing attitudes toward the mainstream American press.

Eden said skepticism toward mainstream media, once associated primarily with more right-wing segments of the Jewish community, has spread across a much broader political spectrum since October 7.

At the same time, he said, those readers have not necessarily turned away from traditional journalism itself.

“They still want real journalism about the Jewish community, about Israel,” Eden said, but increasingly want it from outlets that share certain “baseline assumptions” and whose motives they trust, even when the coverage is critical.

Eden described the national American Jewish media landscape as being in a “prolonged renaissance,” pointing to the growth or revival of outlets across the political spectrum and the emergence of podcasts, newsletters and independent creators.

The picture is considerably more difficult for local Jewish newspapers, however, which face many of the same collapsing advertising models and shrinking audiences confronting local media across the United States.

Despite those pressures, Eden argued that Jewish media has an increasingly important role to play in an American Jewish community that is itself becoming more fragmented.

Media organizations, he said, can serve as the community’s “digital connective tissue,” helping disparate groups understand one another while continuing to report on the divisions between them.