Tal Spungin: The heart and soul of JPost’s digital team

The Jerusalem Post is more than just a newspaper.

While our print edition is very important and has an extremely dedicated readership, equally important is our news site, jpost.com. Here, the Post adapts to the ever-changing world of digital content in real time. It is host to original content written by our hardworking team of breaking news editors, and it is where our reporters can better engage with a wider audience.

Tal Spungin is the heart and soul of this digital news effort.

Starting out as a breaking news desk writer and editor, Spungin, a native of what he refers to as “the picturesque Israeli oasis of Holon,” has climbed the ladder, moving on to becoming desk manager and then to his current role: production manager. At just 24 years old, he has become indispensable to our news operations, helping keep our writers up to date on the latest breaking news.

Spungin has also recently spearheaded a new and very positively received initiative on the digital front called Tal Talks, where he has our reporters take to social media to answer questions from our broad base of online readers about the latest in current events.

In Jerusalem sat down with Spungin to hear about his exciting career at JPost and what makes our digital platforms so important.

This is “Behind the Bylines,” where we bring you a look at the people behind the articles that keep our paper – and website – running.

How did you get into journalism?

I started in a small part-time role at Haaretz to make some money before my army service. As I matured, I became more interested in everything going on in Israel, especially politics during the big elections crisis.

My then-girlfriend’s mother showed me an ad she had seen on the Drushim job posting site for the JPost breaking news desk, and the rest is history. Why bore all my friends with talk of politics when I can write about it instead?

What has your career at the Post been like?

It’s been the best experience and better than I could’ve imagined. I learned everything I needed to know from the experienced minds at JPost who welcomed me with open arms and helped mold my passions into tangible skills.

But by far the most satisfying part of my JPost career thus far has been to be a guiding figure to desk editors, just as others such as deputy editor-in-chief Tamar Uriel-Beeri, night editor Sarah Ben-Nun, Diaspora affairs correspondent Michael Starr, and former desk manager and health reporter Shira Silkoff were for me. Knowing that I have had a net positive impact on someone’s work is worth all the hard work I do.

What makes the Jerusalem Post website so important?

The website is important because all the work we do flows from there. My biggest goal, personally, is to make the reading experience as easy as possible, and have the website as clean and efficient as possible so that anyone, whether in Israel or abroad and regardless of their level of knowledge of the region, can read our articles and gain a better understanding of what’s going on in this part of the world.

This is also why we launched Tal Talks – the live Q&As on social media – as well as many more audio and visual-form stories that are in the works.

What’s one of your favorite anecdotes about working at the Post?

I have had so many downright strange experiences at the Post. One of them was being online for the overnight shift in which we were hacked by Iranians. We were basically ‘handcuffed’ for half a shift, and then had to re-upload a full day’s worth of news to the site because the hackers had deleted it.

Another would be working on big occasions: election nights, the fall of Kabul to the Taliban – things like that. Seeing it all unfold in front of me as I reported on it has changed the way I viewed the idea of working in the media.

What advice do you have for anyone who wants to get into journalism?

Push yourself to write about things you have no knowledge about. So often as a desk worker, I have been assigned stories that I had little interest or experience in, yet there has almost never been a time where I ended up finishing a story without coming round to seeing the topic as interesting. Gaining knowledge in every field you can is important because everything is connected to everything else, especially here in Israel.■