i L i n d . n e t

Dave Pellegrin tweaked me yesterday for lack of disclosure in my story in the current Honolulu Weekly regarding a push by tobacco opponents to ban smoking in apartments and condominium units.

Dave wrote:

Good piece. But if you’re still on the board of a condo association — let alone its president — you should have disclosed that (probably in the italicized author’s note at the end).

He’s quite right. I should have disclosed my position as president of the Century Center Condominium association of apartment owners. It was through Century Center that I learned of the Health Department’s outreach to condos and apartments with offers of support to those interested in going totally smoke-free.

I suppose it slipped past me when writing the piece because being on a condo board doesn’t carry an automatic bias for or against a smoke-free policy, even if one has a clear position regarding smoking. In any case, I’ll suggest a correction in the next issue of the Weekly.

Click on KITV’s link for weather alerts and, among other things, you’ll find a notice that “It’s hurricane season” and “Hurricane season is in full force.” But according to the Central Pacific Hurricane Center, our hurricane season runs from June 1 through November 30. But that hurricane graphic looks great on the “severe weather” page.

My curious friend with the comments on the Advertiser’s use and misuse of the word “Hawaii” in its headlines pointed out that the newspaper’s headlines consistently referred to the Honolulu Marathon as the “Hawaii Marathon”. That’s like the Massachusetts Marathon instead of the Boston Marathon. With a 35-year track record and an international following, the Honolulu Marathon would seem to have earned a bit more respect.

In any case, my friend offered up a few more observations along the same lines.

If you’re bored enough to check it out, you can still see the evidence in the online archives. Just pick a day last week or last month (I first noticed it at least three months ago) and scroll down past all the “breaking” links to “local news.” As a sample, I just picked Nov. 5 at random:

Hawaii beach park changes aided flooding
• Hawaii’s political-ad rules could be loosened
• Hawaii gas prices could rise another 20 cents
• Virus sickened Hawaii cruise ship’s passengers
• Hawaii animal cruelty case charges dropped

Here’s Nov. 7:

• Hawaii homeless have home on donated buses
• Hawaii Superferry probe may be stymied
• Hawaii violates equal-access law, ACLU says
• Hawaii star apologizes for racist remarks
• Hawaii man convicted of murdering deputy

Oct. 15:

• Pranksters want debate on Hawaii’s Chinatown
• Hawaiian Electric beefs up crisis training
• Executive of Hawaii non-profit a felon
• Body of Hawaii teen swimmer found
• Hawaii Gov. Lingle to keynote parks summit

Has to be by design, right? I guess the problem here is that it is so unhelpful for a local audience. Yeah, we get it: all these stories emerge from somewhere in Hawaii. That’s not very useful unless I’m solely interested in anything and everything that happens anywhere in Hawaii. Is the assumption here that the online audience is mostly Mainland?

Looking at that list, some used Hawaii appropriately to refer to the state as a whole or the state government, others less so. But the problem seems clear. Another Nov. 5 headline caused a bit of whiplash: “Some Hawaii residents fault city for flooding”.

This next one appeared under the category City Government: “Hawaii hosts transit symposium Nov. 13″. But, of course, the story is about a transit symposium put on by Honolulu’s city government.

I’m sure you can quickly compile a list of your own favorites.

A comment by Ryan on yesterday’s post added a bit more information:

But now that your reader pointed it out, I’ve also noticed that they’ve started inserting ‘hawaii’ into the URL of every local news story. For example, hawaii712110364.html, hawaii712110363.html, and so on. All that ‘Hawaii’ keyword chumming is classic SEO (note: search engine optimization), and no doubt helps with Google News and other indexes.

I agree that going overboard with the headlines to the articles themselves, though, is a bit troubling. Who are they writing for? Local readers? Or robots?

In any case, you get the point.