From Malia Zimmerman’s Facebook page, posted an hour ago:
“A new chapter for 2015. As of Jan. 19, I will be working with Fox News Channel as an investigative reporter from its Los Angeles bureau.
Hawaii Reporter will continue on as it has for the last 12 years but we need a new bureau chief to replace me.”
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that job and that city are such a perfect fit for Malia in so many ways, i don’t know where to start.
but who will Slom replace her with? (in the office, i mean……………….)
There are a lot of unemployed reporters in town.One of them must be a friend of Sam’s
“a new Bureau Chief”???? huh? that’s what she called herself?? What mothership was she a part of as she ran this “bureau”?? LOL
Ian do you really think the comments mockingly and derisively alluding to a other than professional relationship between Slom and Malia add value to your blog or the readers information? Please don’t go down the Conrow path.
I’m not sure what comments you are referring to. I just searched for mentions of Malia Zimmerman on this blog, and have gone through a number of entries going back more than a dozen years, and didn’t find anything that I would characterize as “mockingly and derisively alluding.”
In LA, the proverbial hoot is eagerly anticipated.
In Honolulu, an occasional source of humor will be missed, sort of.
Fox News is Trash!
Political satire is Fair Game when it comes to public officials and public figures (at least, in a free world). Ask the People of France.
This includes the blasphemous adulterous dangerous sinful concept of *sex* (even in silent Hawaii Nei). Ask former Bishop Estate trustee Gerard Jervis about late Bishop Estate lawyer Rene Ojiri Kitaoka.
yes, we dare to mock politicians. get used to it.
How is this departure tied in with the recent shut down of Smart/Small Business Hawaii?
Did the subsequent end of annual $100,000 subsidies from that group to Zimmerman have anything to do with her moving to this “opportunity”? And won’t she basically be just a stringer for Fox News in L.A. a la the recent Jake Gyllenhaaal movie “Nightcrawler” and not an on-air reporter? :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nightcrawler_%28film%29
Word on the street is that Slom traded in Zimmerman for an even younger girlfriend who now has a job in his office . . . all Slom had to do was fire a longtime male aide to make room for his new young female squeeze.
Typically, young folks will come to Hawaii, make a go of it for a couple of years, and so often end up moving back to the mainland. Those few of them that do make it in Hawaii (especially those who came here in the boom years of the 1960s) so often bail out when they retire and move back to the mainland. But those born in Hawaii, especially those neither young nor retired, tend to stay in Hawaii regardless of their setbacks here. So it is a bit disconcerting to see Zimmerman up and leave. But since the recession there has been a trickle of established professionals born in Hawaii heading to the mainland. Subtly, times have changed.
Every informed and educated person is valuable in Hawaii, regardless of their political perspective. Zimmerman’s articles have been cited on this blog numerous times. (Interestingly, during the Aloun Farms human-trafficking controversy, she took the side of the workers against the management, while other news outlets seemed to side with management.) In a place like San Francisco or New York there are all sorts of artists and coffee shops and jazz quartets and political bloggers. In Honolulu, it’s just a couple of people, and they have a huge impact on the local scene (for instance, this blog). It’s a testament to Zimmerman that so many (anonymous) commenters here feel free to conjecture on her private life, even though she is an otherwise obscure freelance reporter for an obscure website. In the context of small-town Hawaii, she is a celebrity! She made her mark, and no one can take that away from her. (Same is true of Ian Lind.) But this highlights the fragility of this society, with its striking absence of uncorrupted, educated people. It’s not a society with a bright future.
SB Letters to the Editor
Wednesday, July 5, 2000
Complaint against reporter was warranted
It’s mind-boggling that your June 30 editorial would use a complaint lodged by this office against Pacific Business News to accuse Governor Cayetano of having “little regard for the First Amendment” and being “intolerant of criticism.”
PBN has long been one of this administration’s most vociferous critics. For anyone to claim PBN fired its reporter because this office complained is incredible! The Honolulu Community-Media Council complaint against PBN was about accountability.
It was filed after several state officials complained to the governor’s director of communications about the reporting by Malia Zimmerman in a number of PBN stories that lacked objectivity and reflected a personal bias.
We found it troublesome that Zimmerman’s coverage of state government operations was not just slanted and negative, but often parroted state Sen. Sam Slom’s own writing in the newsletter of Small Business Hawaii.
The media council can’t issue gag orders or sanctions. If the complaint was frivolous, the council could have rejected it. It didn’t. It encouraged PBN and the governor’s office to work out a solution before taking it to a mediator to settle. We simply asked that the reporter go through ethics training.
In the end, PBN chose to terminate Zimmerman for reasons other than the complaint. Zimmerman herself says she wanted to use her position at PBN to effect change, whereas editor Gina Mangieri wanted straight reporting and documentation of the facts.
Kathleen Racuya-Markrich
Press Secretary to the Governor
—————————-
Another example of need for two papers
Thank you for your June 30 editorial in unequivocal support of the First Amendment. Recent disgraceful conduct on the part of Governor Cayetano’s office and the management of Pacific Business News, in the firing and attempted blacklisting of reporter Malia Zimmerman, was and is a gross violation of freedom of speech.
I wrote the editor of the Honolulu Advertiser to call this to his attention and to call his hand on honoring the “mission statement” of his paper. That statement proclaims his newspaper’s dedicated adherence to the First Amendment.
The Advertiser knows about the Malia Zimmerman story but apparently cannot drum up the courage to call a spade a spade. That reminds me of the “Broken Trust” story that the Advertiser refused to print before you did.
Same church, different pew. Save the Star-Bulletin!
Richard O. Rowland
Aiea
Don’t let the door hit you in the tuckus on the way out! Gone AND forgotten (hopefully).