One of the more quoted bits of wisdom for our age is that a crisis should not be wasted. Usually cited to prescribe responses to the global financial crisis, it’s an idea whose time has come not only for America as a whole but also for the magazine you hold in your hands.

You probably noticed that you did not receiveHadassah Magazine in March, and that’s part of our emergent plan. With this April/May issue, the printed magazine becomes bimonthly. Though we hope to return to 10 issues a year, at this moment the budgetary pressures of printing and postage are too great to continue at that pace.

But we are using the crisis as an impetus to address the existential questions of journalism today—issues that inevitably involve the printing-and-postage-free Internet. Our retooling actually began two years ago with an interview of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert that was too timely to hold for print. Though it went into the June/July 2007 issue, the interview was on our Web site (www.hadassah.org/magazine) in April. We have since placed a half-dozen extras online—the most recent, in February, being Haim Chertok’s “Home Front Diary” and David Wolpe’s essay, “Money Saves, Money Destroys.”

Now we are adding to our Web presence. In the months between our bimonthly print issues, we will be putting extra editions of the magazine online. The first Web-only edition went up in March.

While magazine space is finite, Web space is not. So even in the months that we produce a printed issue, we will be running additional content online. Look for more reviews and a calendar of cultural events. And if you’d like to be notified when these editions and features are going up, please e-mail us atmagazine@hadassah.org.

We may not solve every problem, and our strategy is still evolving. Our goal is to get as much information to you as possible, and we intend to use every communications resource we can in not letting the current crisis go to waste.
—Alan M. Tigay