“For me, it’s a love story, it’s like you’re insanely in love with someone then
you wake up in the morning and find out she betrayed you.”
With 22 years
spent as a photojournalist at Ma’ariv, Yossi Aloni is one of the veteran
employees facing an uncertain future as the newspaper appears to be on the verge
of closing.
Animated and with long curly grey hair, the father of five
has become a prominent face in the thick of the protests held by Ma’ariv over
the past few weeks. Inside the lobby of the newspaper on Thursday, Aloni cooled
off in the air conditioning after marching with a few hundred fellow employees
to the headquarters of Ma’ariv’s parent company, IDB, at the Azrieli
Mall.
Aloni appeared the picture of a company man who spent decades
working what seemed to be more of a calling than a job.
“I had offers
over the years to work elsewhere but I never went for it. I can’t explain it,
it’s just, [Ma’ariv] is home.”
Aloni talked about the joys of being a
print journalism photographer, the feeling of holding a newspaper in his hands
and seeing the pictures he took splashed across full pages.
He also waxed
nostalgic for years past, when the paper budgeted the time for long form photo
projects, before the manic pace of the Internet news age came in.
“When
you get a good picture, not online, where its gone right away, but the next
morning in the paper people are reading across the country, it is like a drug.
There is no other way to describe it,” he said, shaking his head.
Over
the years, Aloni photographed thousands of stories that wrote the history of the
past two decades of Israel, from peace summits to wars to the days of the terror
attacks during the second intifada when there “were [terror] attacks all the
time and we’d hear of an attack and run out like crazy people tearing across the
city.”
Aloni said the job was part of everything he did and every
consideration from what type of gear to get for his motorcycle to what type of
shoes to buy.
“Look, 22 years is a bit of history. I did so many things
here, so many,” he added, heading off for an uncertain future.