Press mentions
In May 2004, HaAyin HaShevi'it interviewed journalists, business people and media experts in Israel who cited Rolnik as an influential columnist: "Rolnik writes the most important economic column in Israel, he has no competition. As a member of boards and committees I hear very often people talking about what Rolnik wrote this morning. People read his daily column avidly and with fear. There is no other journalist in Israel that has such position in his field—he is the master of the domain… When he mentions a person or a phenomenon in his column—its value will go up". A senior executive in the media industry was quoted: "Rolnik is the most influential economics journalist in Israel, I read every word he writes. Unlike other journalists he manages to surprise me time and again because his position is so unpredictable".[14]
In February 2011, The New Yorker's editor, David Remnick, published a story about Haaretz and Schocken, saying "Under the leadership of a young, hyper-ambitious editor named Guy Rolnik, TheMarker brought a new, more youthful audience to Haaretz—one at least as interested in the high-tech industry as it is in the Palestinian issue—just as the worldwide newspaper crisis hit. TheMarker, which can be bought separately, has helped save the paper. Rolnik has been especially good at publishing investigative pieces on what he calls the 'Israeli oligarchs,' a small group of billionaires and their families who control much of the national economy".[15]
In March 2015, journalist and media critic Michael Massing highlighted the work of TheMarker and Rolnik in an essay, "How to fix American Journalism", that appeared in the special issue of The Nation magazine for its 150th anniversary. According to Massing, the unique campaign that waged Rolnik as editor-in-chief of TheMarker is the model for fixing American journalism:[16] TheMarker waged an unflagging campaign beginning in the mid-2000s against the extraordinary concentration of economic power in Israel and the dangers that this development posed to Israeli society and democracy. Led by its founding editor, Guy Rolnik, the paper ran periodic stories and columns that paid special attention to the "Israeli oligarchs", a small group of billionaires and their families who controlled much of the Israeli economy. When the campaign began, the subject of economic concentration was barely discussed in Israel. The stories fed growing outrage over inequality, leading to a series of mass demonstrations in 2011. Those protests, in turn, spurred the Knesset to pass a bill to break up the Israeli conglomerates. It was a remarkable display of how one news organization, through tenacious and unflinching reporting over a period of years, can help spur systemic change. ... Remarkably, of the many high-profile digital-journalism sites—the Huffington Post, The Daily Beast, BuzzFeed, Business Insider—not one scrutinizes America's oligarchs the way TheMarker did Israel's. ProPublica, the prime investigative site on the web, has done impressive reporting on a number of important subjects, including fracking and the secret Fed tapes, but in general it remains wedded to a traditional narrow-focus approach".
