Changes of editor nearly always are followed by changes in content and style, as readers of the Times, Telegraph, and the Observer would testify. The main complaint, in these consumer-obsessed times, is usually that the titles have moved down-market or lost touch with their core audience.
The reality is that every newspaper has to shift with the times when there are so many other news choices, ranging from the internet, to free-sheets and 24/7 broadcast news. Israel is not insulated from this trend and even the oldest and most revered titles have to change.
Within Israel there has been an intense focus on Ha'aretz, Israel's most peacenik title, since the replacement of London-born David Landau, architect of the English-language edition, by Dov Alfon earlier this year.Landau brought an intense focus on diplomacy and the occupation to the paper, reflecting the views of its liberal owners, the Schocken family and its German partners DuMont Schauberg. But the new editor represents a more commercial strand of the paper. He is a product of the The Marker, the independently produced "business pages" of the paper which have bought into the free-market zeitgeist of Anglo-Saxon capitalism and are as a result more commercially savvy. It is more interested in the workings of finance than in the debate about Israel's policies towards the Palestinians.
The most obvious manifestation of the new regime has been the departure or reshuffle of a series of writers, including Meron Rappaport, Gideon Levy, Amira Hass, Danny Rubinstein and Akiva Eldar. Calev Ben-David, writing in the Jerusalem Post, has seen this as a kind of conspiracy - an attempt to marginalise those writers who sought to make the occupation their issue.
That may have been a consequence of the changes but was not necessarily the objective, according to Ha'aretz insiders. Almost all of the shifts can be explained with more prosaic reasons. Amira Hass, who reported vividly from the West Bank for more than five years - a stressful assignment - is taking a year's sabbatical. Veteran Danny Rubinstein is taking his pension, and so on. A deliberate shift in the paper's political stance, they insist, it is not.
Nevertheless, the charge that Alfon no longer wants Ha'aretz to be known as the paper which just chronicles occupation clearly struck home. The editor and his proprietor, Schocken, felt the need to defend themselves, responding to charges of retreat made in the media journal The Seventh Eye.
"Ha'aretz was against the occupation before Amira Hass and Meron Rappaport," they insisted, "and it will be after them." The occupation is Israel's "most severe ailment, one that endangers its very existence" - a view echoing that of Landau when he appeared at Jewish Book Week this year. Then the rub. Schocken intoned that he would love to be the publisher of a paper which campaigned solely against the occupation but that is not what the readers want. They also want to know what is going on in fashion, for example. So the debate is as much about modernising content to meet the requirements of a new generation of readers, as changing its historic position on the peace process.
As one insider told me, "The paper is no less committed to ending the occupation. But there was a feeling that the paper needed to be a lighter, more attractive read." It wants to reposition itself to capture the readers being haemorrhaged by Ma'ariv. Changing the tone and shape of newspapers is a difficult balancing act.
Evolution rather than revolution is often the less risky course. Ha'aretz may have moved a little too quickly and ruthlessly for some tastes.