Honolulu Weekly

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In 1836, three transplanted Bostonians with offices on what would become Merchant Street unveiled the Sandwich Islands Gazette and Journal Of Commerce, Honolulu’s first newspaper. Since then, more than 1,000 different papers have served Hawaii, the overwhelming majority of them on Oahu. They have helped to navigate–and in many cases steered–the discussion over the future of the Islands. Often, they have represented that future themselves–from David Kala-kaua to Linda Lingle, at least five future monarchs and governors have worked in the newspaper business at one time or another.

Today, Honolulu is one of the last cities in the United States with two competing morning daily newspapers, and is also served by an independently-owned weekly, which are in increasingly short supply as mainland weeklies conglomerate. Honolulu still enjoys what Honolulu Advertiser publisher Lee Webber calls “a multiplicity of antagonistic voices,” which many believe is a critical element of a healthy democracy.

But how much longer will that be the case? Overall readership has been in decline for decades, and papers here are locked in a fight for survival, less with one another as with Google News, Twitter, Facebook and the rest of the Internet. Can Honolulu’s newspapers be saved–and are they worth saving?

While reportorial staffs at local newspapers have been dwindling for years, 2009 has brought the message home to readers in ways they can see–and feel.

Changes at the Honolulu Star-Bulletin have been the most dramatic. On April 13, that paper said goodbye to nearly a century as a broadsheet–the familiar and still most common presentation of metro newspapers like the New York Times, USA Today and others–and unveiled a completely redesigned product, in tabloid form.

Dennis Francis, president and publisher of the Star-Bulletin and MidWeek, says the shift from broadsheet was partly a money-saver for the short term, but was driven much more by a desire to compete over the long haul. “From my experience, I knew that this community often referred to either paper as ‘the newspaper.’ A lot of research showed that many people could not differentiate between the Star-Bulletin and the Advertiser. For example, people would read something in our paper and then say they’d seen it in the other paper, and vice versa.”

Francis says he began asking about two-and-a-half years ago how the Star-Bulletin could differentiate itself from its primary competitor.

“We knew how successful it has been for MidWeek–its readership continues to grow. So we commissioned some research and it showed we would increase our market share.”

So far, so good. At a historical moment in which circulation at many daily newspapers across country is in steep decline, the Star-Bulletin, which had already posted a 10 percent year-to-year readership gain in 2008, says the new format is spiking readership even higher. “Obviously, we track it very closely,” Francis says. “It varies, but our daily numbers are up anywhere from five to 12 percent,” he says.

That’s rare good news in the newspaper business. Still, the Star-Bulletin has a ways to go to catch its morning competition. The Honolulu Advertiser boasts a daily circulation of roughly 140,000 and, according to national media tracking group Scarborough Research, a readership of around 346,000.

At the Advertiser, too, things are changing. In March, the paper launched a redesigned paper based around a new 44-inch “web width”– the paper got narrower, and smaller. “It’s a different paper than it was a year ago the way that all other papers are different,” says Advertiser publisher Lee Webber. “They’ve all been impacted by different forces, the Internet of course being one, craigslist being another, blogs being another, the whole change in communications.”

Barbarians at–or inside–the gate?

“Impacted” is putting it mildly. The online revolution in communications technology and the wholesale flight of readers from print to the Web have put the American newspaper industry on the brink. Paid circulation accounts for between 15 and 20 percent of revenue at the average major metro paper. The remainder of the operating budget, plus any profit, is made up by selling ads. Those ads have been plummeting for the better part of a decade, and analysts expect advertising revenue to deteriorate further in the coming years–the research firm PriceWaterhouseCoopers recently forecast a 32 percent drop by 2013. Meanwhile, the once-expected windfall of online ad revenue has yet to materialize–even at the papers with the heaviest web traffic, online ad sales constitute no more than 10 percent of total ad sales.

While revenues are dipping across the board thanks to a generation of declining readership, nowhere has the impact of the web been felt more than in the classifieds. Classified advertising was the foundation of the modern newspaper’s business model, accounting for a higher proportion of revenue than any other source at major metropolitan dailies. The advent of [craigslist.org], which allows for much easier, generally free classified listings, changed the business model of the mainstream American newspaper forever.

Craigslist has made life miserable for independent weekly newspapers as well, many of which were even more dependent on classified advertising than their daily counterparts. “I remember Tim Redmond (editor of the San Francisco Bay Guardian) chastising (craigslist founder) Craig Newmark at a meeting once,” says Laurie Carlson, who founded Honolulu Weekly in 1991 and remains its publisher. “[Redmond] was really irate that this man had ruined the business.”

Carlson says the Weekly has always had a different business model from the local dailies–because it is distributed for free–and even from weekly papers on the mainland. “A lot of weeklies were built on private party advertising, which we never had,” she says, referring to the person-to-person, often adult-oriented ads that once filled the back pages of mainland weeklies but have fled to craigslist in recent years.

Carlson says the current economic environment hasn’t been as rough on the Weekly as it has on the dailies. “Other than January, when we took a terrible, terrible hit, this year seems to be normalizing.” Still, the paper has been forced to cut staff this year, and to run thinner papers than it has in recent memory.

Industry-wide, the obvious and immediate effect of the severe drop in revenue in the Internet era is heavy cost-cutting. The litany of cutbacks is well-known, with papers closing out-of-town bureaus, dropping beats and laying off workers–many of them from newsrooms. Nationwide, more than 15,000 journalists lost their jobs in 2008 via “voluntary” buy-outs or outright layoffs.

Many papers, including some of America’s most venerable metropolitan papers, have succumbed entirely. In 2009 alone, the 150-year-old Rocky Mountain News and Seattle’s award-winning Post-Intelligencer have ceased printing newspapers (though the PI survives, at least in some form, online). The New York Times Company, which owns the Boston Globe, has threatened to close the paper if it cannot reach an agreement with its workers. If Hearst Newspapers follows through on its commitment to shutter the San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco will become America’s first major city without a daily newspaper.

Even for papers that are so far surviving, some local professionals say, the loss of so much income has meant a sudden erosion of one of the most hallowed and critical characteristics of the American newspaper–the much-ballyhooed “brick wall” between the business and editorial sides of the operation. “My job is to ensure the economic viability of the newspaper and in so doing, keep my newsroom free,” says the Advertiser’s Webber. “To keep my newsroom free so that we can fulfill our constitutional responsbility to the community.”

That freedom–generally defined as a newsroom unconstrained by government or commercial pressure–may be imperiled. Kawehi Haug, a former editor at Honolulu Weekly who now covers entertainment for the Advertiser, says she has noticed a shift. Haug says that earlier in her career, the wall was intact.

“I worked at big papers, and at the reporter level you never felt [pressure]. There was a big buffer between what was going on in advertising and what was going on at the paper. And I even feel a big difference in the year and a half I’ve been at the Advertiser.”

She says that these days, revenue concerns are present in news meetings.

“The wall has narrowed drastically. Before it was like you weren’t a good reporter or editor if you even considered these things. And then at some point, when your job is threatened, and you’re losing money–I don’t know how many times a week we say this: “We’ll do what we have to do. If this is a sinking ship, and that’s what bailing water means, then that’s what you have to do.’”

How deeply can you cut and still call it a newsroom?

The creep of revenue-related concerns into the newsroom, a problem that is by no means unique to the Advertiser, points to a larger question: Even if Honolulu newspapers survive, will they still be capable of performing the vital watchdog function with which the nation’s founders entrusted them?

Richard Borreca has been covering politics and government in Honolulu since the early 1970s. Newspapers were then enjoying a heyday that seems almost unimaginable now. “The number of [reporters] is down dramatically at the Capitol,” says Borreca, who writes for the Star-Bulletin. “ There used to be a whole room just for the electronic press, and there were many more print reporters there. That’s gone.”

The thinning of the reporting corps has gone hand-in-hand with the thinning of the papers themselves. “The length of our stories has gotten dramatically shortened. And our staffs aren’t as large as they used to be, so the amount of time you can spend on one single story has dropped. There were days when we’d write two stories a day, and that’s still true now. The length, however, is shortened. Today we see shorter stories and fewer of them.”

Borreca is not fatalistic on the future–“I don’t think the Bulletin is likely to flinch”–but he does wonder how well Honolulu is served by its newspapers in this leaner era.

“I don’t think people even know that there used to be a labor beat, a reporter…[doing] the work of just showing up at the meetings…knowing what people are talking about, so that you can ask ‘well, why didn’t you do this?’” Borreca says. “Things still happen on those beats, but the trees are falling in the forest and we have no idea how big they were, what direction they fell or what they hit.”

Mark Platte, who has been editor of the Advertiser since 2006, acknowledges that something has to give. “Absolutely it does, even for us, and we’re the big gun in town. We don’t cover every beat I would like to cover. We cover hospitals, but we don’t have anyone on health care. We’re not covering higher education. When you reduce the staff, you’re not going to be able to do the kinds of stories you need a lot of time on. Especially the kinds of investigative stories that really take a lot of time and effort.”

“We used to have a reporter for each region of the island. We were getting great stories out of it. I know people in those communities liked seeing us there, and now they don’t see us. They may be getting the sense that we don’t care. You drive through Mililani and think, we haven’t covered anything out here in two months.”

Carlson, at Honolulu Weekly, says that lack of local reach is part of the reason she started the paper 18 years ago.

“I saw a real void in what the dailies were doing,” she says. “At that point…there were no entertainment tabloids, very few local book reviews, no local movie reviews, which is pretty much still true. There were a lot of things that people talk about at lunch that never make it in the paper. And I wanted to get some of those things in the record. Things that just aren’t touched. And that’s still true.”

As technology changes, society is changing along with it. Every newspaper employee we spoke to for this story, from publishers to reporters, predicted big changes in the industry’s business model, and all of them felt newspapers would soon end the practice of giving their content away for free online. But will that be enough to survive the influx of Twitter, Facebook and Web communication applications as yet unknown?

“It’s not on our radar on the immediate horizon,” said the Star-Bulletin’s Francis. “But it’s certainly in the near future. The trick will be, how much it is worth to consumers.” Francis also said it’s possible that the Star-Bulletin will be distributed entirely free, though he said there are no current plans to do so. “It’s certainly a possibility,” he said,” because it’s still about achieving a certain level of reach and readership to drive results for advertising.”

Carlson says that until and unless the industry figures out the online revenue model, she expects the Weekly to survive primarily as a print product. “There’s going to be a need for us.”

At the Advertiser, Webber says he’s not sure whether the company will still be putting newspapers on the street in five years’ time. “I honestly don’t know,” he says. “But we will be here. That I will tell you.”

Haug isn’t as sanguine. In fact, she is transitioning out of the industry at what one might expect to be the beginning of her prime.

“There is no way,” she says, “for print to keep up with online. I’m not sure I think they’ll disappear altogether, but I’m pretty sure they will not be in the service of the public anymore. It’s the fourth branch of government, right? That’s why I got into this. But that’s not what they will become.”

Haug, like many industry watchers, believes many papers are headed for boutique status, the projects of wealthy publishers who don’t have to care about circulation or profits.

“Had newspapers caught on that we would be at this point–that there would be people who would rather get their news from a Twitter feed than a newspaper or even a newspaper Web site–would we have done things differently? I’d like to think we would have, but we didn’t, and now here we are. ”

“Newspapers were one of those tools that forced critical thinking on people,” Haug says. “It was like, ‘no you can’t sit there and pretend that everything is the way you want it to be. Here: think about it.’ Well, now that’s being taken away and there’s nothing to replace it and people aren’t any better critical thinkers than they were before. What’s going to happen? I don’t know, but it’s probably not anything good.”

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Press Check

Putting together a newspaper takes a lot of people and hard work. So does printing it. Here’s our salute to the hardworking guys and gals who print the Weekly every week.

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177 years of newspapers in Hawaii

1834 — Ka Lama issues its first edition in Lahaina. It is Hawaii’s first newspaper.

1836 — Sandwich Islands Gazette becomes Honolulu’s first newspaper, and the state’s first in the English language.

1840 — The Polynesian, a Missionary paper, begins publication.

1849 — The first newspaper to question American influence in the Islands, Honolulu Times, is launched by Henry H. Sheldon

1856 — Whitney begins publishing the Pacific Commercial Advertiser. Known today as the Honolulu Advertiser, it was wildly pro-annexation and would remain in missionary family control until 1992.

1861 — David Kalakaua publishes Ka Hoku o ka Pakipika. The future merrie monarch would also later be known as the “editor king.”

1866 — The Daily Hawaiian Herald becomes the first English language daily newspaper.

1880 — As the revolutionary era gathers steam, the Hawaiian Gazette, led by the future president of the Republic of Hawai’i, joins other establishment papers in the fight to weaken the monarchy.

1881 — T’an Shan Sin Pao, Honolulu’s first Chinese newspaper, begins publication.

1892 — Robert Wilcox’s The Liberal emerges as a strong voice for Hawaiian self-determination.

1893 — The Advertiser commemorates the overthrow of Queen Liliuokalani as a “glorious” day in Hawaiian history. Its owners were among the key plotters against the monarchy.

1900 — Chinatown burns. One English-language paper refers to the events as “almost a clean sweep.”

1903 — The Pacific Cable connects Hawaii and its newspapers to North America via telegraph.

1909 — Statewide, 30 of roughly 100 newspapers are printed in languages other than English or Hawaiian, including Portuguese, Filipino, Japanese and Korean.

1918 – Following vicious anti-German campaigns in nearly all Hawaii papers during WWI, many German residents leave the Islands or anglicize their names.

1924 — Hawaii Hochi, the leading Japanese-language paper, claims circulation of 10,000, not far behind the Advertiser’s 15,000.

1931 — The Massie case affords local dailies an opportunity for sensationalism they prove incapable of resisting.

1941 — The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor ushers in formal censorship of local newspapers by the military. Many papers are forbidden from publishing.

1950 — After a four-year campaign by the Honolulu Record, Dr. Shunzo Sakamaki becomes the first Asian-American to be named a full professor at the University of Hawaii

1955 –Waikiki Beach Press launches an era of free, weekly community newspapers, which blossomed on Oahu for the next two decades.

1962 — The Advertiser and Star-Bulletin enter into a Joint Operating Agreement, in which business functions are combined while newsrooms stay ostensibly independent.

1963 — Hawaii Newspaper Guild strike lasts 47 days. Pacific Business News also begins publication this year.

1971 — Gannet Corporation buys the Star-Bulletin.

1984 –The first issue of MidWeek is mailed to Oahu homes.

1993 — The Advertiser is sold to Gannet, ending 141 years of family ownership.

The Star-Bulletin is sold to avoid conflict of interest laws.

1999 — Liberty Newspapers threatens to close the Star-Bulletin, but community outrage prompts its eventual sale to Canadian newspaper magnat David Black.

2001 — The JOA comes to an end.

Sources:

Chapin, Helen. Shaping History: The Role of Newspapers in Hawaii. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1996.

Mookini, Esther. The Hawaiian Newspapers. Honolulu: Topgallant, 1974.