Last week’s consolidation of Honolulu’s two morning dailies into a single organization was a loss on many levels, most of them already well-chronicled.

But now what? Journalists are still charged with keeping an eye out for the developments, issues and stories that matter in Hawaii, and whether we like to admit it or not, the Advertiser played a substantial role in how we went about that. For some of us, the paper’s reporting was the starting point, and we sought to fill in the gaps. For others, the paper established the baseline facts we used to re-report the same stories in different media. Some of us even used the Advertiser as a model of what to avoid.

We put our question to editors, publishers, news directors and bloggers. The news must go on: How will it be different in the months ahead?

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To understand the challenges–and opportunities–local journalists now face in preparing the news, it’s important to recognize the role major metropolitan daily newspapers play in what might be called the “food chain” of journalism. These are the primary news-gathering organizations in any community, their resources stretching far beyond those available to any other news operation. Even in these lean days for newspapers, the Honolulu Advertiser’s final newsroom headcount was at 120. That number does not include the business or administrative operations: that’s 120 people dedicated to reporting, editing and designing the news, every day. By contrast, KHON-TV’s news team is less than one-fifth that size. Hawaii Public Radio’s news department, the last surviving radio newsroom in Hawaii, employs eight journalists, including one part-timer and four news hosts. The number of full-time Honolulu Weekly employees devoted solely to journalism and editorial design currently stands at three.

Every one of those organizations reports original stories, uncovers news and offers it to residents in a unique format. That said, there is simply no comparison when it comes to the sheer volume of original reporting conducted by a major metropolitan daily–everyone else, both inside the profession and in the community at large, is dependent on the daily as the primary source of information about what’s going on in the community. That top-of-the-food-chain primacy is why newspapers are so often said to be critical to civic life–it allows not just everyday residents but also government officials and business leaders access to information that is otherwise unavailable. Paradoxically, it is also part of why newspapers are often held in low regard–they are responsible for reporting everything that matters in a community, accurately and quickly. That this is an impossible task does not stop editors and reporters from attempting it, nor does it stop readers from expecting it. Once a major paper is gone, however, its shortcomings quickly recede, drowned by the silence in its wake.

Honolulu has now entered that wake. This was, until earlier this month, the smallest city in the United States that could still rely on two competing morning dailies in the traditional model. In journalism tradition, it has long been believed that to genuinely thrive, a newspaper needs direct daily competition–that competing editors stay up a little later trying to outthink each other, that reporters make that extra phone call to dig a little deeper than one another, that photographers shoot the extra roll. As competition has declined along with revenues and the business model in general, the theory goes, so has the quality of the newspapers that have are still hanging on.

The survivor

Over the past two weeks, there’s been some debate among journalists and readers about the nature of Honolulu’s surviving daily newspaper. Is the new Star-Advertiser the old Star-Bulletin, printed in broadsheet format and with a few cherry-picked Advertiser staffers thrown in? Or is it the other way around: an attempt to reproduce the Advertiser on the cheap? Time will tell, but the 30 newsroom journalists who made the switch from the Advertiser to the new paper don’t have the luxury of worrying about it.

One of them is is Marsha McFadden, who joined the Advertiser in 1998 and was most recently managing editor for content, the paper’s second-most senior editorial position. McFadden is now city editor at the Star-Advertiser, a post that involves assigning and managing the paper’s local news coverage.

Last week, as McFadden was getting a first look at how the news will be made in this new environment, she talked about what competition meant for the Advertiser and how the Star-Advertiser might proceed in the absence of a rival.

“I think it was healthy competition,” McFadden says of the late rivalry. “Certainly we wanted to know they were doing, and I’m sure vice versa. There was a sense of pride when you had the scoop. You did want to be first.” McFadden says that while competition had its limits, it was a driving force. “We would push, hard, to get stories into the paper, knowing that they were probably working a similar story. Did that rule everything we did? Absolutely not. But sure that was a factor.”

Going forward, McFadden says she and her colleagues at the Star-Advertiser are mindful of the potentially corrosive effects of being the only large-scale game in town. “There’s a way that you probably [do] a deeper job of exploring a subject or a story because you know there’s another beat reporter on the same story, and that isn’t there now.” At the same time, McFadden sees other factors at work, and even some ways in which the absence of another large daily may create opportunities.

“The flip side is that there’s more pressure now to do more important stories. There is a huge responsibility for this paper to go deeper, because now we’re the only ones, to investigate more deeply and just to get it right. And those conversations are already happening, [about] the sense of responsibility we now have.”

McFadden says the diminished likelihood of losing a scoop will make some difference in the way stories are handled, but promises that the Star-Advertiser will not dawdle.

“Can we give officials who may be stalling one more day to respond to our questions? I suspect in some cases we will. It does afford us another day, but it doesn’t mean there’s endless time to research. Folks like PBN and bloggers can’t be ignored, either. We can’t have it appear that we’re slow to move.

“So yes, it does help in some ways to feel like you may have that extra day to really get it. But we know there are still competitors out there.”

Radio days?

The flip side of the daily newspaper’s firepower and staffing advantages is the nimbleness and creativity that often characterizes smaller operations. That’s an advantage that Hawaii Public Radio enjoys–that and the increasingly rare benefit of a captive audience.

Kayla Rosenfeld, who has been HPR’s news director for a decade, spoke for many journalists and others when she described her morning routine last week. “I’ve been going through the Star-Advertiser,” she said, “reading it, and by force of habit turning to look for the other paper, to see whether they’ve got the story and how they handled it.”

It’s a habit many readers are finding hard to break these days. “If you’re a professional in the newsroom,” Rosenfeld said, “it affects ability to gather information.”

HPR, like many news organizations, relies on the Associated Press for much of its base news coverage. But with the AP also in transition recently, Rosenfeld points out, many of its stories came from reporting by the Advertiser and the Star-Bulletin. For HPR’s morning hosts, that meant checking to see that, for example, the mayor’s comments on a particular subject appear in both morning dailies. Now the AP feed has to carry that load. Doing an impromptu check of last Thursday’s AP feed, Rosenfeld noted that she saw more stories from other, smaller outfits, such as West Hawaii Today. “Some of this,” she noted, “could also be coming straight from press releases.”

That process–news organizations across the board carrying essentially unreported stories directly from press releases by businesses, government agencies or community groups–has been on the increase as news budgets have shrunk. The result–more news generated purely by interested parties, as opposed to fact-checking reporters–leaves the audience less informed.

Despite the new challenges, Rosenfeld says HPR’s newsgathering approach remains intact. “We use [daily papers] as a reference, sure, but in fact we go out of our way to find stories that aren’t in the newspaper. Our mission, like [Honolulu Weekly’s] mission, is to provide stories that aren’t available anywhere else.”

With fewer newspapers, and thus fewer stories in them, does that change HPR’s responsibilities?

“Yeah,” says Rosenfeld, “but you also have limited capacity. How much can you assign a single reporter without working them to death?” Even more to the point, she says, is that the big papers had long since lost some of their advantage.

“Newspapers, which were the gathering places or considered to be the be all and end all, are now fighting for their own reputations. We’re out there, and so is everybody else. So it’s not, ‘Do we try to provide more?’ but ‘How do we continue to provide the interesting stuff with the limited resources available?’”

HPR has some ideas about that, and it has one key new resource available. Having recently completed a major push to increase its broadcasting power, the organization is preparing to launch a major new initiative.

“As a further effort to link the communities of Hawaii and expand our reporting,” Rosenfeld said last week, “ we are planning to launch a morning drive-time show.” Rosenfeld says the show is expected to launch in early 2011 with Beth-Ann Kozlovich as its primary host. “Jim Russell, who created Marketplace [among public radio’s most successful programs] is a consultant. It’s part of a larger strategy of expanding public radio statewide. This was in discussion before the newspaper merger, but it does emphasize the fact that we do need to do whatever we can to get stories out there.”

A new Beat

A rebirth of radio could be part of Honolulu’s future news mix. That mix has already gotten a boost from a new online-only newsroom. Funded by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, [civilbeat.com] boasts an impressive roster of journalistic talent both local and national, led by award-winning former Rocky Mountain News Editor John Temple. The site launched in May.

“This wasn’t predicated on there being two daily newspapers or one,” Temple says. “It was based on a vision of whether we could create a certain way of approaching news and whether people would…appreciate it enough to pay for and support it.” While nonprofit–and free–online-only news sites are springing up to some success in other U.S. cities, Civil Beat is going the other way, charging $20 per month for full access to the site’s reporting and moderated discussion forum.

“What it may do on the margins is create a frustration for some readers, a hunger that they’re not getting enough, and create a willingness to support other journalistic organizations.”

Temple uses the Weekly’s arts and entertainment coverage to make a point about the now-dead morning competition. “You weren’t trying to be TGIF, even if you do have some of the same information. You’re trying to do it with a unique voice. There’s a difference. But if I had stripped out some of the columnists, could I have really told the difference between the two daily papers? I don’t actually think so.

“They didn’t verge much in terms of what they were trying to do, ideologically or otherwise. Why did a town need that much sports coverage? Could it have pooled some areas of coverage to make resources available for other things? And yet they couldn’t do it, because they were competitors.”

Temple says he imagines more differentiation and even cooperation among remaining local media. “Hawaii Business really mines a niche, PBN does, [the Weekly does], we will. And the web allows for aggregation, so maybe we can tell people, ‘Hey, there’s a lot of great stuff out there in other places, you should take a look at that.’ The Advertiser would never do something like that.”

In general, Temple isn’t convinced the merger of the two dailies will make as big of a difference as many others suspect. “The new paper is essentially the Advertiser, which was the stronger of the two papers to begin with. It’s essentially the same amount of locally generated stuff. The difference is that the new paper has a ton of wire copy. The reason for that is, in my view, that David Black has to send a message at least initially that this is a bigger paper.”

[Civilbeat.com] is moving ahead as planned, Temple says, and he doesn’t expect the daily changes to alter its work much. The site’s model is based on depth, not breadth, and he doesn’t believe the monthly subscription fee is a barrier.

“We believe there are people in every walk of life who will respond to this–who will support us because they know that we will be bulldogs, that we will keep asking tough questions. We get government agencies telling us, ‘Nobody’s ever asked these questions before.’ We want to produce information that will connect with people, and will say to them, ‘This is your community.’”

“I sort of believe that destruction creates opportunity,” Temple says. “We’re in a wrenching period of change. Ian Lind is talking about bringing together bloggers. There are nonprofits capable of doing great work…Environment Hawaii is really good.”

Civil Beat boats six full-time journalists. Temple says one way the site is thinking about responding to the Advertiser’s demise is to add voices. “We’re sticking with the core beats, but we’re expanding our coverage of them. I’m working on adding contributors who will contribute to [civilbeat.com] because they have expertise in certain areas.”

The old and the new

Ian Lind has seen this before. A veteran journalist and former Star-Bulletin staffer, Lind fought to keep the Bulletin alive when it faced closure in 2000, but while the paper survived, his role investigative reporter did not. In the years since, his [ilind.net] has become one of Honolulu’s most popular blogs, and is widely read by journalism professionals in particular. He describes what he does as “trying to flag issues of public policy and public interest that are often overlooked or put on the back burner in meeting the daily demands of journalism. I follow my curiousities about what government agencies are doing and try to offer up topics that I think are interesting.”

About the new daily environment, Lind sounds concerned, given the differences he saw toward the end of the two-daily era. “The Advertiser has had more resources to devote to public policy issues,” since the end of the two papers’ joint operating agreement in 2001. “It has been more willing to use legal resources and to spend money on Freedom of Information Act kinds of issues. They’ve come closest to covering key beats. I’m a diehard Star-Bulletin guy, but I’ve looked first at the Advertiser.”

Lind says it’s not a disappearing daily he’s worried about, but the disappearance of day-to-day political coverage and the other kinds of depth that papers once provided. “I’m not so worried that [the Star-Advertiser] will abandon ship and leave us all blind. But it will be more of the same trend: shorter stories, more use of press releases. That’s the sad fact.”

Lind isn’t sure the lack of a competing daily will hold him back, and points to techonological changes that have in fact made his document-digging activities much easier than they were even a decade ago. “Government agencies have started using the web as a way to make their information directly available. For someone who loves to prowl documents, that’s a big plus.”

Echoing Temple’s sense that independence coupled with aggregation and cooperation may be one way forward, Lind says, “I’ve floated with other bloggers the idea that maybe there are things that we can do jointly whether it’s sharing skills or finding outside resources for technical issues, things we can’t do on our own. We’re just beginning to talk about it.”

He compares the current state of news media to the transition from the Big Three broadcast networks to cable television.

“Now you’re watching 200 channels and you can gear your intake to your particular interests, which is great. At the same time, it’s harder for all of those stations to make money. The same thing is happening in news. Instead of one or two mainstays, we now have hundred of blogs. For newspapers, it’s tough. In terms of truly independent papers in Hawaii, you’ve got the Weekly and Environment Hawaii–after that, the list gets pretty short.

“Think about the loss of those human resources for gathering news. If this follows the national trends, those people are not going find jobs producing news. They’ re going to find jobs in PR. It’s a terrible public loss. The same thing has been happening slowly for years. Now it’s happening all at once.

“At the same time, this is prompting lots of soul searching with those who have some background in professional journalism. Everyone’s searching for that magic…it’s an opportunity for somebody.”