Time to check the mail.

Pat Tummons, publisher of Environment Hawaii newsletter, sent this comment yesterday via email:

You refer to the Star Bulletin’s story on the sorry state of birds in the US, especially in Hawaii, and praise it as an example of what newspapers do. I clicked on the link to read the story (FYI, I used to get the SB delivered daily to my office in Hilo — that stopped inexplicably after the SB closed its Big Island bureau). Saw that it was bylined with Star Bulletin Staff and news sources.

I don’t know who the SB staff were, but shame on them for identifying the palila as pilala!

The AP story carried in the Hilo Trib Herald also had a mistake that any beat reporter would NOT have made: it referred to DLNR employee Scott Fretz as Scott Fetz — not just once (excusable as a typo, maybe), but
several times.

So even though I lament the loss of newspapers, I lament, too, the reliance on non-local sources for local stories by what newspapers remain standing. In the old days, a story emanating from afar with a local twist (such as that about Hawaii’s birds) would have been “localized” by a reporter acquainted with the subject. I guess that just doesn’t happen anymore.

And more’s the pity.

Actually, I had pointed to the bird study as an example of a kind of citizen science rather than to the news story itself. That point aside, Pat’s comment is unfortunately right on point.

I note, however, that both spelling errors had been corrected by the time the Advertiser ran the AP story this morning.

The Advertiser’s Derrick DePledge reported in The Notebook blog on a new survey regarding civil unions.

If you’re interested in further details, the survey results are available here.

Former Star-Bulletin photography and photo editor Dean Sensui responded to the issue of newspaper archives.

Regarding newspaper archives, the Star-Bulletin was cut off from its huge archives of photographs when it moved to the new offices in Restaurant Row. There was a deal with Gannett in which the Bulletin could scan its share of photos over a three-year period, but David Black did nothing about it until there were only a few months remaining in the agreement.

At which point there was a scramble to get it done.

After he and I argued about how to do it, he finally relented and took my advice. A small group of us scanned and carefully catalogued thousands of photos over a period of several weeks. The Bulletin now has one of the few searchable digital archives of historic photos in Hawaii. To this day I don’t believe the Advertiser has done anything about this, yet the process was very simple.

I got two Powerbooks. One was connected to a scanner. Two people would work as a team. One person scanned the photo, save the file to a disk, then hand the photo to the other person. The second person would open the file that was just scanned onto the disk, then annotate the file with all the information contained on the back of the photo. That person would also add any additional information that could be deduced from that group of photos. For example, in addition to identifying the individuals in the photo, a note would be made that it came from a series of photos about a particular incident.

Another problem was that many of the older photos were heavily retouched for the sake of newspaper reproduction. The photos were sometimes scanned twice: the way it was retouched, then how it looked after it was properly cleaned off. Sometimes objects or signs would show up that were previously obscured.

Black wanted to automate the process. But I argued that this wasn’t a method to process paper. It was a process to conserve historical documents.

About a hundred photos a day were scanned. It was the last thing I did for the Star-Bulletin. George Lee took up the task after I left and so did Richard Walker. Hope that legacy survives somewhere in the long run.

Dean Sensui
Base Two Productions

Hawaiian musicians apparently are making quite a splash in Austin, Texas, this week during the South by Southwest Music and Media Conference. A friend in Austin pointed me to the musical lineup along with a few of her photos.