The Yankles? New team takes new swing at bringing professional baseball to Israel!

Remember the Israel Baseball League? How could you forget? Tabloid Baby's comprehensive coverage of the disastrous 2007 season and the tragicomic failed attempts to carry on led to our editor and Our Man Elli in Israel being submitted for a Pulitzer Prize-- being cut off at the pass by gatekeeper Sig Gissler-- and given a place in the Baseball Hall of Fame at Cooperstown. Now, a new group of sportsminded US businessmen with stars-- and shekels-- in their eyes-- are ready to give it another go. Our Man Elli leads us to the article in YNetNews, noting that it "mistakes Martin Indyk for Dan Kurtzer":

NY Yankees make aliyah

Co-Owner of legendary American baseball team
promotes initiative to establish
professional baseball league in Israel

Itamar Eichner

American businessmen, including one of the owners of legendary baseball team The New York Yankees – which is worth approximately $1.5 billion – are promoting an initiative to establish a professional baseball league in Israel.

The businessmen visited Israel and held meetings with Vice Prime Minister and Minister of Regional Development Silvan Shalom and Jerusalem's Mayor Nir Barkat, in which they asked for their assistance.

As part of the initiative, the businessmen proposed to build a baseball stadium near Jerusalem's Teddy Stadium, which will serve as Israel's central baseball hub.

Following the meeting, Barkat promised to promote the project and help find a proper location for the construction of the stadium.

Minister Shalom offered the businessmen governmental aid, if they were to build stadiums in the country's northern and southern regions.

"The entrepreneurs are aware
that baseball is not
very popular in Israel,
but believe it can
gain a following."

Officials were also examining the possibility of building a stadium in Netanya, which brands itself as Israel's sports hub.

One of the men involved in the project is billionaire Jeffrey Rosen, who owns Israeli basketball team Maccabi Haifa.

The businessmen have also approached Israeli diplomats, and asked them to help coordinate meetings with Israeli officials that can help promote the project.

The entrepreneurs are aware of the fact that baseball is not very popular in Israel, but believe that with time it can gain a following. At first, they plan on catering to American expatriates living in Israel, who continue to follow the popular American sport.

Past attempts to import the sport have proved unsuccessful. In 2007, the first professional Israeli baseball league was established, and one of its managers was former US ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk.

Six teams participated in the league's first season, but the second season was cancelled after the league suffered financial loses. Despite the failure of previous initiatives, the American entrepreneurs, who enjoy the support of The NY Yankees, want to have another go at it, and believe this time they will hit a home run.

Cick here to read Tabloid Baby's entire coverage of the Israeli baseball fiasco.

Pete Rose in Hell

The disgraced Major League Baseball great sold autographs this weekend at the Forum Shops mall at Caesars Palace casino in Las Vegas, wearing a cap that camouflaged his Cincinnati Reds glory with a coating of gamblers' dust.

Our Man Elli in Auschwitz

Our Man Elli in Israel has returned home to Jerusalem after a trip to Auschwitz, Poland, for events commemorating the 65th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi death camps as the rest of the world celebrated International Holocaust Day. Elli, also known as Elli Wohlgelernter, the award-winning journalist, New York City tabloid veteran, Pulitzer Prize-nominee for his investigation of chronicler of The Israel Baseball League and familiar across the Middle East as correspondent Israel Broadcasting Authority, spent time at the Auschwitz I andd Auschwitz II-Birkenau camps, and sends this report:

I was in Auschwitz last week for International Holocaust Day. My first impressions: Well, one word dominated everything: freezing. I would recommend anyone visiting Auschwitz to only go in the winter. One cannot imagine the suffering, or anything for that matter, because it all looks so pretty, a winter wonderland with clean snow without any red blood. But the cold? That you can feel, even with two pair of gottkas, two pairs of socks, gloves, heavy coat, Chinese fur hat, and the coat hood over that. And then you imagine being there without that clothing. That's as close as you can get to any understanding-- and even that is limited.

As for the Auschwitz Museum: well done, actually, considering how old it is, and that we've seen all the pictures of the display. The hair gets to a lot of people, but I wasn't as moved by that as I was by the suitcases, with everyone's names on it; and the shoes, and how bad a shape most of the soles were in-- real poor Jews; and surprisingly, the hundreds of pots and pans, all in just three colors: red, blue and white, for milchig, fleishig and parve.

Inside another building in Auschwitz 1 is a still-standing gas chamber, which was only used at the beginning of the war before Birkenau was built and, next door, the ovens. That, needless to say, leaves one speechless.


Another thing: the difference between Auschwitz and Birkenau. The entire Auschwitz complex, with many sub-camps, is some 40 square kilometers, which is huge. Auschwitz 1, where the museum and Arbeit Macht Frei sign stand, is the old camp, originally for political prisoners. It's a hotel compared with Birkenau. The barracks in Birkenau, such as they are, are stark, but it's still hard to imagine what it was like. The wood will eventually rot away, and they have to decide what to do with that; very disturbing is graffiti cut into the stone walls, with dates going back 20-30 years. How crazy and sick. If kids can do graffiti in Birkenau, I tried to imagine the most obscene thing 30 years from now, when Holocaust denial will be more prevalent. I came up with Playboy doing a pictorial, "The Girls of Auschwitz," with shots of them sprawled out on the bunks. If that sounds sick, which it is, it's part of the surreal feeling that you feel altogether.

With the snow covering everything, you get no sense of what's what, even one who knows more than the average visitor. But at one point I went walking away from the crowd, and came upon what was a long, narrow, underground room/corridor. Now open, there was snow covering it, except the side walls of brick, and I knew right away that this was the undressing room before the gas chambers at the end of the corridor. That blew me away.

What was also interesting to me was that I, a full-blown crybaby, didn't cry once, mostly because all I thought about was the cold.


I went as a representative of the IBA. I did a phone interview live, and brought back a couple of interviews, and thankfully there was real work to do. Also Davaned in the Rama Shul, and saw his cemetery, which was very interesting, in the old Jewish neighborhood of Kazimeirz.

Just being in Poland for the first time was heavy. Overall, unforgettable, of course. but i need to see more of Jewish Poland (such as it is)-- Warsaw, Lublin, Lodz and the other camp sites.

And that's my recap for now.

The National Enquirer will enter John Edwards scandal coverage for a Pulitzer Prize: Well-deserved, but good luck getting past Sig Gissler!

The National Enquirer plans to enter its coverage of the John Edwards paternity scandal for a Pulitzer Prize.

"It's clear we should be a contender for this," executive editor and Tabloid Baby pal Barry Levine told the Washington Post today, after the former presidential candidate admitted what the newspaper had been reporting all along: that he fathered a child out of wedlock in an adulterous affair. "The National Enquirer, a supermarket tabloid, was able to publish this reporting."


Levine, and the Enquirer undoubtedly deserve the Pulitzer. They championed the story. They dedicated the resources and moved forward against the lies and brickbats hurled their way, while the lazy, "mainstream" media fed off their scraps and covered the story from a distance until it was safe to go in for the kill and start buying up the players for headlines and morning show interviews.

Ultimately, we predict the Enquirer won't get a Pulitzer, most likely because old Sig Gissler, the Pulitzer prize administrator, probably won't even let the nomination reach the Prize Board.

Readers of this site will recall the uproar when Gissler screwed TabloidBaby.com and its correspondent Elli Wohlgelernter out of a Pulitzer when he rejected our nominations for the groundbreaking coverage of the Israel Baseball League scandals out of hand-- citing some technical clause for refusing to let the Pulitzer boardmembers decide for themselves.

Mr. Pulitzer may have been a tabloid king, but the Pulitzers' Ivy League ivory tower does not admit tabloid journos.

Holy Land Hardball's tribute to Our Man Elli

Holy Land Hardball, the documentary about the optimistic, hopeful start of the Israel Baseball League in 2007, got its first nationwide U.S. audience last night, thanks to an airing on the MLB Network and proved to be a great, feelgood work of art about a group of men who became young again by carrying out an innocent, naive dream in a foreign land. Yet to those who know how the story played out, the film proved to be a poignant, even anger-making document as the cheerful, seemingly guileless businessmen behind the scenes were revealed to be charlatans, liars, scamsters and worse.

Experiencing Holy Land Hardball without the real-life epilogue of deceit and failure that followed would be like watching a lump-in-the-throat doco about Mark McGwire's chase of baseball's home run record later tonight, with no knowledge of his overdue shameful, tearful steroid admission on the very same MLB Network earlier this evening.

Yet for us, there was a high point to Holy Land Hardball, and that was the quick tribute given to Our Man Elli in Israel early in the film. As disgraced IBL founder Larry Baras is profiled affectionately as a bagel-making bumpkin blustering his way through the baseball business, there is a brief moment when he is shown being interviewed by Our Man Elli.


There he is, Elli Wohlgelernter, the journalist who would expose the moral and financial corruption of the IBL days after the final pitch, shown interviewing Baras months before the first pitch, Elli towering over the self-styled baseball exec, the no-frills professional, holding a large, makeshift hand microphone, wearing a tie, kippah in place, unmistakeably an Israeli, unquestionably a Jew, asking Baras:

"And how fearful are you
that you could end up
being called 'a colossal failure'?"

Baras does not answer.

The filmmakers, baseball historians that they are, were sitting in their editing room doing post production on the film at the same time that Our Man Elli's reportage was spooling out from this site and other publications, day after day, month after month. They saw that Larry Baras was being called many other things beyond "colossal failure." They realized that Elli was onto something from the start, and knew that history would prove him right.

So they gave him that tribute.

Nice job, boys. We're only sorry it took us this long to see it!

Click here to read the complete year-long coverage of the rise and fall of the Israel Baseball League and much more of Our Man Elli's reportage at Tabloid Baby's special Baseball in Israel archive site.

Israel Baseball League doco on television

Our Man Elli in Israel offers a programming note: Holy Land Hardball, the documentary feature about the startup of the Israel Baseball League in 2007, can be seen on television tomorrow evening on the MLB Network.

Our Man Elli's got a cameo in the doco, so we'll be sure to tune in and go for a screen grab, although the world now knows that the story of the Israel Baseball League was not told until the day after the final out of the first and only season, and led to a solid year of Elli Wohlgelernter's independent, exclusive, groundbreaking coverage of seamy deals, athlete-endangering nincompoopery and arrogance that exposed the dream introduced in Holy Land Hardball as an international scandal and nightmare, and won Elli and Tabloid Baby, where his coverage appeared exclusively, a place in the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y.

Holy Land Hardball, a film by Brett Rapkin and Erik Kesten, makes its national television premiere this weekend, airing on the MLB Network Sunday, Jan. 10, at 10 p.m.

Click here to read Our Man Elli and Tabloid Baby's complete coverage of the Israel Baseball League successes and scandals at our Baseball In Israel archive site.

Tabloid Baby makes Baseball Hall of Fame

Our Man Elli in Israel has discovered a fact that Pulitzer Prize gatekeeper Sig Gissler might have found interesting before unceremoniously rejecting our nomination: Tabloid Baby has earned a place in The National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown!

Our groundbreaking, exclusive, historic coverage of the benighted single season and wacky aftermath of the Israel Baseball League was cited as a major source in The Cooperstown Symposium on Baseball and American Culture, 2007-2008, discussed at length in the hallowed Baseball Hall of Fame, and immortalized in print in the recent book edited by William M. Simons.

Gaining special attention was Elli Wohlgelernter's bombshell exposé of the IBL, an article that first appeared on this site exclusively days after the season ended as Can't Anyone Here Run This Game, and causing an international sports firestorm the likes of which would not be seen until the Tiger Woods scandal.


Read all of Tabloid Baby's Israel Baseball League coverage at our Baseball in Israel site.

Sex & Baseball Grand Slam! Our Man Elli's kudos for Conan

Our Man Elli in Israel, the man behind our Pulitzer Prize-nominated coverage of the Israel Baseball League (thanks for nothing, Sig Gissler!), checks in after a long absence (hard at work as a correspondent for the Israel Broadcasting Authority) to offer declare a “Grand Slam for Conan O’Brien” for a late night sex and baseball joke:

“Parents’ groups are complaining that TV broadcasts of baseball games are filled with ads for erectile dysfunction drugs. In other words, things are so turned around these days that now we delay baseball by thinking about sex.”


And who’d forget that Our Man Elli is subject of the Sex & Baseball documentary project…

Legendary journalist and Dupont Award winner Abramovitz expresses shock, outrage over Tabloid Baby Pulitzer Prize c*ck block by Sig Gissler

Scandal continues to roil beneath the surface of the 2009 Pulitzer Prizes, as it was revealed here that the Pulitzer Prize board's intentions to have the entry field opened to non-print Internet news organizations was thwarted by its administrator and gatekeeper, Sig Gissler, who unilaterally prevented Tabloid Baby's Pulitzer Prize nomination from reaching the prize committee for consideration, thereby stealing from journalist Elli Wohlgelernter and the Tabloid Baby team the honor they surely would have won for their exclusive investigative coverage of the United States-based financial scandals surrounding the Israel Baseball League.

"Who is this man who has usurped transparency in the selection of prizes by the Pulitzer committee? It's shocking to believe that one human being makes the decisions, and makes them in an awful, undignified and disrespectful way."

The latest to throw his (cowboy) hat into the ring is journalism legend, author, tabloid television pioneer, practicing attorney and 1984 DuPont Award winner Rafael Abramovitz, who, like other hardworking, experienced journalism professionals who do not mix in the rarified ivory tower journalism school circles of those whose entrenched ways are leading the death of the newspaper industry, scoffs at Sig Gissler's contention that the respected, ten-year-old Tabloid Baby news organization does not "genuinely fit the criteria"-- and that its entry was not "in a binder."


"There was no transparency in the awards handed out by the prize committee this year," Abramovitz said this morning. "And I'm talking in terms of the decisions about nominations of Internet news organizations. It's shocking to believe that one human being makes the decisions, and makes them in an awful, undignified and disrespectful way.

"Who is this man who has usurped transparency in the selection of prizes by the Pulitzer committee?

"Does the word 'committee' mean anything to him?

"This is an outrage!"

Chuckling over that last line, the Resistol-sporting New York City-based journo continued in all seriousness:

"The most shocking aspect of this is what happened to the nomination of Tabloid Baby, which is known for its unique, imaginative, often fantastic reportage and has gotten that reportage on the Internet well in advance of other so-called mainline Internet sites. Print organizations are no match for Tabloid Baby. After all, it's there on the cusp of instant reportage.

"And this man whose name I have deliberately forgotten? The Pulitzer Prize committee, if they want to maintain their prestige role in journalism excellence, might want to forget it as well."

Elli Wohlgelernter responds after being f*cked out of a Pulitzer Prize by Sig Gissler

"Needless to say, I am very disappointed, not just for the decision to reject the application, but for the reason given. If this wasn't original news reporting and coverage of an ongoing story-- over a year's worth of exclusive after exclusive coverage-- I don't know what is."

Elli Wohlgelernter reacted today to news that Sig Gissler, administrator of the Pulitzer Prizes, decided on his own, without consultation, to reject Tabloid Baby's Pulitzer Prize nomination without even giving the Pulitzer board the chance to consider the entry materials, thereby denying Tabloid Baby and Wohlgelernter the award they so obviously deserved.

Former print journalist and newspaper defender Sig Gissler may have thought he was striking a blow for old school print journalism and slamming the door on upstart wiseass Internet journos when he made the controversial decision, but in doing so, he shut out a news team whose four main contributors have more than 150 years of journalism experience among them (all of which began-- and continues-- in newspapers), including veteran print and television journalist Wohlgelernter, who led the coverage of the US-backed scheme to bring professional baseball to Israel (see the complete Tabloid Baby coverage here).

Wohlgelernter, known in these parts as Our Man Elli in Israel, is a New York-born and bred journo now based in Jerusalem, said today:

"Needless to say, I am very disappointed, not just for the decision to reject the application, but for the reason given. Tabloid Baby was instrumental in exposing the ongoing sham that was perpetrated against the American Jewish and Israeli communities, while the rest of the mainstream media in Israel and the U.S. ignored-- even covered up-- the story.

"If this wasn't original news reporting and coverage of an ongoing story-- over a year's worth of exclusive after exclusive coverage -- I don't know what is. And it continues even this week, with Tabloid Baby's report on the Israel Baseball League declaring Chapter 11. How many millions of dollars were raised from American Jews, and where did the money go? Where is the rest of the media?"

In light of the insult lobbed by Sig Gissler, it's worth noting Elli's original expression of humility when he got word of the nomination in December:

"I could never have imagined in my 35-year career that I would be honored and blessed in such a way as to be nominated for a Pulitzer. When I was a kid just dreaming about the business, the Pulitzer meant more to me than the Nobel Prize... A Pulitzer? It only validates all the hard work that's gone into all the exposés that Tabloid Baby and I have uncovered and revealed..."

Sig Gissler's action has led to outrage among Internet and new journalism professionals.

Luke Ford: "Tabloid Baby shut out of Pulitzers"

Ur- and uberblogger Luke Ford reflects the growing outrage among Internet and new journalism professionals over the unilateral decision by Pulitzer Prize gatekeeper and administrator Sig Gissler to stop the Pulitzer board from considering Tabloid Baby's landmark original, investigative coverage of the US-based Madoff-like Israel Baseball League scandals from being considered by the Pulitzer committee for a 2009 Pulitzer Prize.

Pulitzer outrage: Evidence shows Sig Gissler turned 2009 prizes into "Soylent Green deathbed handjob for terminally-ill newspaper industry"

The scandal over the 2009 Pulitzer Prizes expands today as the Pulitzer administrator's unilateral rejection of Tabloid Baby's nomination is shown to reflect a general anti-Internet bias while revealing yesterday's awards as little more than a Soylent Green deathbed handjob for a terminally-ill newspaper industry.

The claims that the nomination of TabloidBaby.com for its exclusive, groundbreaking coverage of the United States-based effort to plant professional baseball in Israel was blocked unfairly by Pulitzer administrator Sig Gissler (before the Pulitzer committee could see or judge it) is supported by other coverage and statements by Gissler himself.

Tabloid Baby’s nomination was encouraged by the Pulitzer committee's December 8th announcement that the 2009 entry field would be expanded to include "news organizations that publish only on the Internet." No Internet-based news groups, however, were among the Pulitzer winners, and in announcing the prizes yesterday, elderly former print journo Gissler admitted that the awards were a sop to the ailing print industry.

From Reuters:

“The strength of the prize winners' work shows the power and significance of print journalism, said Sig Gissler, administrator of the Pulitzers.

“Newspapers are suffering badly in the recession, with massive job losses, elimination of sections and cancellation of home delivery. A few have ceased publication, slashed salaries and filed for bankruptcy.

"’The watchdog still barks. The watchdog still bites,’ Gissler said. ‘Who would be doing this day to day if we didn't have newspapers?’

“None of the prizes went to stories about the economy or the financial crisis..."

The same Reuters dispatch shows that gatekeeper Gissler and the committee may indeed have been biased against the word “Tabloid”— not to mention this site’s praise of Rupert Murdoch as a champion of journalism (and former boss):

“The Wall Street Journal, one of the nation's most prestigious daily papers, did not win a prize this year.

“The paper has not won a Pulitzer since Rupert Murdoch bought it through News Corp's purchase of Dow Jones & Co in December 2007. In the previous 10 years, the Journal won Pulitzers in all but two years.”

Ultimately there were no online winners in the 2009 Pulitzers.

From Editor & Publisher:

“There were 65 online-only entries this year, the first time it was allowed, but 21 were rejected because they came from news sites that do not do ‘primarily’ original reporting and are mainly ‘aggregators.’"

TabloidBaby.com, it should be pointed out, is not an "aggregator," and has been lauded for its original reporting— reporting that is all too often stolen by the print media without attribution. It has in fact, called out major newspapers for doing so-- which may have been another factor in Gissler's decision to cut off Tabloid Baby's nomination at the knees.

Pulitzer outrage spreads!

The New York-based Gawker.com media site is among the Internet journalism organizations that have expressed outrage over Pulitzer Prize administrator Sig Gissler's unilateral decision to reject TabloidBaby.com's 2009 nomination.

Sig Gissler f*cks us out of a Pulitzer Prize

The Pulitzer Prizes for Journalism were announced today. You may have noticed that Tabloid Baby was not among the winners.

And for good reason.

The Pulitzers' gatekeeper wouldn’t let us in.

The Pulitzer Prize board had announced on December 8, 2008 that it had expanded its field to include submissions from Internet news organizations like ours:

New York, Dec. 8, 2008 – The Pulitzer Prizes in journalism, which honor the work of American newspapers appearing in print, have been expanded to include many text-based newspapers and news organizations that publish only on the Internet, the Pulitzer Prize Board announced today.

The Board also has decided to allow entries made up entirely of online content to be submitted in all 14 Pulitzer journalism categories…

So in January 2009, the nomination of TabloidBaby.com, an internationally-known, followed and copied Internet news organization of ten years standing, was tendered to the committee that gives away the Prize named after one of the legendary names in Tabloid Journalism.

Only to be stopped at the door by the board's administrator, a man named Sig Gissler.

Who is this Sig Gissler? Who is he to decide what the committee should consider? After all, it was his name and phone number that was included on the press release announcing the inclusion of Internet journalists. Judging by the list of 2009 Pulitzer Prize winners released today-- a day the New York Times leads with a waterboarding story lifted from Internet bloggers, while new newspaper closures are announced) and the experience this site received at his hands, it appears that the apparent septuagenarian Sig Gissler is an old white shirt-and-tie print journo from days gone by, waging a last-stand defense of the newspaper industry as it circles the bowl.

The announcement about the Pulitzer committee considering Internet organizations? That was just a publicity and credibility ploy. The Pulitzers were trying to look cool and "with it," like back in Sid's middle-age, when an old square would put on a Beatles wig and shout "Yeah, yeah, yeah!"

Screwed

Following the December 8th announcment, Tabloid Baby's entries and entry material were mailed to the Pulitzer committee in January. This site's editor Burt Kearns and correspondent Elli Wohlgelernter were nominated for 2009 Pulitzer Prizes for their "exclusive online coverage and editorials on U.S. businessmen's involvement in the fall of professional baseball in Israel” in two categories: "a distinguished example of investigative reporting by an individual or team, presented as a single article or series, in print or online or both"; and "a distinguished example of reporting on international affairs, in print or online or both."

In February 18, the Tabloid Baby office received an email from Pulitzer Prize administrator Sig Gissler.

“When we saw the email marked ‘Pulitzer entry,’ we were expecting congratulations,” says contributor and media liason Sam Peters. “Instead, we were sucker-punched.”

The email read:

Dear Mr. Kearns:

Thank you for your interest in the Pulitzer Prizes. We would like to accept your entry but it does not fit within our rules.

Submitted online material must have appeared on a Web site "primarily dedicated to original news reporting and coverage of ongoing stories." In our guidelines, we urge entrants to ask themselves if they "genuinely fit the criteria" and we specify that an entry's cover letter should provide "ample evidence" of an online-only news organization's "primary devotion to original news reporting." We do not find the requirements to have been met.

Further, the entry is improperly prepared. It should be in a binder with each exhibit clearly numbered.

I am sorry to disappoint you. Although entry fees are non-refundable, we will make an exception in your case because this is a transitional period for the Pulitzers. In due course, we will return your check.

Sincerely,

Sig Gissler, administrator
Pulitzer Prizes

To quote Mr. Peters, "WTF?"

Confident that our website had met all criteria as described on the entry form as "an eligible news organization that publishes--in print or online--at least weekly; that is primarily dedicated to original news reporting and coverage of ongoing stories; and that adheres to the highest journalistic principles," we had but one question for the fussy Sig Gissler:

"Was the decision to reject our entry that of the Pulitzer Board or your own?"

His reply?

Dear Mr. Kearns,

Eligibility decisions are made by the administrator, implementing rules established by the Pulitzer Board.

Sincerely,
Sig Gissler

Scam

So again, who is this Sig Gissler?

According to the Pulitzer and Columbia websites, Sig Gissler is a midwestern print journo from an era past who retired from active journalism in 1993 and continues to preach the old values behind the ivy-covered walls of Columbia University's School of Journalism:

"Sig Gissler has been administrator of the Pulitzer Prizes since 2002. A special faculty member at Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism, Gissler is founder of 'Let's Do It Better,' the school's national Workshops on Journalism, Race and Ethnicity. He is the former editor of the Milwaukee Journal. During his 25 years with the paper, he served as reporter, editorial page editor and associate editor before becoming editor in 1985. Gissler left the paper in 1993 to become a senior fellow at the Freedom Forum's Media Studies Center, exploring media coverage of race... In 1998, Gissler was voted teacher of the year at the journalism school..."

We'd say old Sig Gissler and his Pulitzer cronies are simply elitist, liberal j-school snobs who turn up their noses at a news organization that contains the word "tabloid"-- until we take another look and see that every winner of this year's journalism prizes is an oldstream print newspaper outfit (No Nikki Finke, no Past Deadline, no Luke Ford) and then we realize that Sig Gissler's just a square and that the significance of the Pulitzer Prizes is going the way of the newspaper.

And he still hasn't sent back the check.

(Not even worthy of Pulitzer consideration? Head to our Baseball in Israel archive site to see all our US-Israel baseball coverage and judge for yourself.)

(Top photo of Sig Gissler by Irina Slutsky)

UPDATE! "Soylent Green deathbed handjob for terminally-ill newspaper industry!"

Update: Israel Baseball League's controversial "interim president" and twittering, money-seeking huckster David Solomont files Chapter 11

David Solomont has filed for bankruptcy protection.

Solomont is the well-known and controversial Boston area investor who took over as frontman for the Israel Baseball League from disgraced Boston bagel baron Larry Baras amid the financial disarray that followed its disastrous first season, intimated that he would rescue and restart the league with his own personal fortune and connections, then promised an eleventh-hour 20-game second season that was eventually downgraded to a five-game show weekend that never took place but was never officially canceled. When last heard from in these parts last December, Solomont was still attempting to raise money from US-based Zionists and Jews for a 2009 Israeli Baseball season that had already been blocked by Israeli government sports officials.

Solomont filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, according to papers filed with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Boston.

Solomont, who was a pioneer in announcing his business intentions and daily activities on Twitter, reportedly was a founder of the Massachusetts Software Council and a founder of CommonAngels, a top angel investment firm based in Lexington, Massachusetts.

Solomont listed his assets as being between $1 million and $10 million. His wife, Joan Solomont, is listed as a fellow debtor.

An attorney for Solomont refused to comment on the case.

Solomont has faced legal troubles in the past. In 2004 he was accused in civil cases of diverting money from a startup he presided over to a holding company he ran. The outcome of those allegations is still unclear.

Solomont's Israel baseball shenanigans and the entire exploits of the Israel Baseball league were documented here in coverage led by Our Man Elli in Israel. The entirety of our Pultizer Prize-nominated coverage can be found at our Baseball in Israel archive site.

In wake of Israel's Gaza attacks, Our Man Elli's interview with Jon Voight is a hot topic again

Israel's recent retaliation in the Gaza Strip has directed worldwide attention to Elli Wohlgelernter-- recently announced as Tabloid Baby's 2008 Journalist of The Year-- and his videotaped interview with an unlikely Hollywood Zionist.

Our Man Elli in Israel was honored for his tireless, influential and groundbreaking coverage of the Israel Baseball League and its surrounding hoopla and mischief, but as a correspondent for the Israel Broadcasting Authority, he also covers politics and war. In May, he interviewed actor Jon Voight, who stands out in his industry as a conservative, pro-Israel hawk, touching on the issues of Hamas and the rocket attacks directed at Israel from Gaza. The interview was posted on YouTube and on this site in the Spring, and has been subject of a surge in viewership after Israel's raids this week.

By this morning, the clip had logged more than 100,000 views.

The YouTube rankings at the turn of the New Year reflect its prominence:

#100 - Most Discussed (All Time) - News & Politics - Israel
#20 - Most Responded (Today) - Israel
#7 - Most Responded (Today) - News & Politics - Israel
#72 - Most Responded (This Week) - Israel
#23 - Most Responded (This Week) - News & Politics - Israel
#53 - Most Viewed (All Time) - News & Politics - Israel
#36 - Top Favorited (All Time) - News & Politics - Israel
#24 - Top Rated (All Time) - News & Politics - Israel

More fuel for Elli's Pulitzer, we'd say.

Tabloid Baby's 2008 Journalist of The Year

Elli Wohlgelernter
Tabloid Baby's 2008 Journalist of The Year

You know him as Our Man Elli in Israel. Television viewers and newspaper readers in Israel know him by the sign-off and byline of Elli Wohlgelernter. We've known him for 27 years as Elli, the New York Super Jew, Woody Allen's brain in the body of Tony Roberts, the rabbi's kid from the Columbia J School who wound up at the New York Post, then the desk at Channel 5's legendary 10 O'Clock News, then on to a cross-country and ultimately international journey that would land him in jobs on weekly newspapers, at television stations, in Hollywood and ultimately lead him to Jerusalem, where he settled 17 years ago, started a family, ended a marriage, and in 2006 embarked on a solitary journalistic grind that influenced the future of a nation and a sport.

Elli's coverage of the machinations behind the Israel Baseball League led to great anger among his countrymen, resentment by his colleagues and a concerted effort by his story subjects to smear him.

But for close to three years now, he's followed the story, exposed the scandals, protected lives and broke news on a momentous saga that the rest of the world media has yet to come to grips with.

And he did it for free.

The relevance? Go to our Baseball in Israel archival site and read the entirety of his Israeli baseball coverage. Then look to the recent arrest of Bernard Madoff, the Wall Street macher who allegedly bilked his fellow American Jews of 50 billion dollars.

The scope of the baseball story is not nearly so large, and the charges are not criminal, but the parallels are many. And the chutzpah is unmatched.

Elli's nation is at war this week, and his attentions are elsewhere. But as he looks toward Gaza, his IBL reportage lays the groundwork for other journalists and historians to dig even deeper, and (along with a change in rules that allows Internet journalism) rightfully led to his nomination for a Pulitzer Prize in 2009.

It also seals his position as Tabloid Baby's 2008 Journalist of The Year.

The Person of the Year?

Stay tuned...