This dissertation explores the ways in which the professional identity of Israeli journalists has been constructed, negotiated and articulated through the years. The study\u27s guiding theoretical framework views mass media communication as a process through which communities share and negotiate information, values and beliefs. The extension of this approach implements its analysis with regards to the journalistic community, arguing that journalists are not only members of a professional group but also members of an interpretive community. While journalists tend to portray their work as objective, individualistic, immediate and informative, the interpretive community frame depicts that work as value-laden, communal, continuous and narrativistic. This exploration of the Israeli journalism as an interpretive community focuses on stories that were narrated, through the years about the radical and sensational weekly Haolam Hazeh (1937–1993). At certain stages, the weekly offered an alternative to mainstream Israeli journalism in a variety of dimensions such as choices of content and style, the relations between journalists and the political establishment, and especially Haolam Hazeh\u27s revolutionary formulation of its social criticism through professional journalistic tools. Correspondingly, Haolam Hazeh was used by the mainstream journalistic community of the 1950s and 1960s as a “functional transgressor”: the strategic public denunciation of the weekly was articulated in order to define the boundaries and inner-hierarchies of the journalistic community and to enforce normative standards. At the same time, however, Haolam Hazeh was also utilized by the Israeli press as a source of professional inspiration, a de-facto journalism school, and as an unofficial channel for exploring themes that were unacceptable to the mainstream community. Thus, Haolam Hazeh \u27s existence as such a paradoxical phenomenon underscores the inner contradictions that delineated the Israeli journalistic community during that formative era and the ways in which they were resolved. The investigation of later journalistic accounts of Haolam Hazeh\u27s story shows that the weekly is nowadays positioned as a precursor of contemporary critical Israeli journalism. The current construction of Haolam Hazeh as a constituting memory of Israeli journalism, through narratives that address both past and present themes, is utilized to reinforce Israeli journalists\u27 status as independent and authoritative public narrators
