I started getting emails Wednesday morning following eBay chairman Pierre Omidyar’s announcement of the planned launch of “a Honolulu-based local news service that will produce original, in-depth reporting and analysis of local issues in Hawaii.”

Plans which, they way, will create a profitable and sustainable enterprise.

All I could think of was, “Good luck!”

Seriously, though, it’s hard to know just what to think about it.

I don’t know Omidyar, have no idea how he perceives Hawaii politics, and, so far, nothing has been disclosed about the business plan for the enterprise that would allow it to climb the cliffs of profitability and sustainability.

Omidyar could afford to run a substantial news room with the small change from his billionaire’s income, but this isn’t charity, it’s a business being described as a prototype of something new in journalism.

The web form set up to accept resumes from those interested in hiring on with the project asks just a few direct questions.

In 100 words or less, when did you first realize that the Web was going to change journalism forever?

In 100 words or less, what advice would you give the news industry?

Then applicants are asked for the best headline and best lead “you’ve ever written”.

Whew.

Omidyar is being advised by retired McClatchy veep Howard Weaver, who has been doing a lot of high profile blogging and other writing since retiring at the end of 2008.

Weaver’s musings on the future of journalism have not been without controversy.

Clearly there’s a lot of talent involved in the planning and there’s no shortage of experienced journalists looking for work.

Maybe we’ll be at ground zero of a significant turn in online journalism. I’m looking forward to watching this one develop.

For another journalism model, check out this recent column from Online Journalism Review describing labor’s role in backing several different projects.

It caught my eye because I had recently speculated about the potential for labor taking a more active role backing investigative journalism here in Hawaii.

At that time, I wrote:

It seems to me that unions should be at the front end of the new journalism movement. If a major union like the HGEA mustered its resources, it could easily put together a staff of experienced reporters and convert its inward-looking newspaper and web site into widely read news sources covering labor issues. Unions could even pool resources to create a labor-oriented newspaper with in-depth reporting.

I don’t want to say that the unions deserve the bad press they get, but it’s certainly true that they aren’t doing themselves or their members any favors with the current policy of tight lips.

It’s happening elsewhere, why not Hawaii?

Then, from the “with friends like that” file, did you notice the “editor’s note” in the current issue of Honolulu Weekly, introducing and essentially undermining the cover story?

The cover story is by Curt Sanburn, himself a former Weekly editor, who is able to gently explain how out of step Honolulu’s planned rail project is from the urban transit mainstream and the latest transit technology, represented by at least 20 mainland cities that have built new rail systems in the past two decades.

But before readers get to Sanburn’s story, they hit editor Ragnar Carlson’s roadblock which warns that, in Carlson’s view, the rail story just isn’t up to his reporting standards.

But why in the world would the Weekly’s editor go out of his way to undercut the issue’s lead story? If it were my story, I would be furious.

Along the way, Carlson says he wants a positive spin to stories, saying they “should be for something” and not just criticize. That’s an odd, middle of the road stance for a publication that postures as an alternative weekly. I’m more used to hearing that from the more conservative mainstream.

Hard hitting social and political criticism, often lacking that benign positive perspective, has long found a home in weeklies. Heck, it’s been the backbone of the alternative weekly movement. But perhaps no longer in HW, it seems.

As a Weekly reader, and a former contributor, I can’t help being disappointed.

Now, getting back to Sanburn’s story. He was able to get Toru Hamayasu, Honolulu’s chief transit planner, to acknowledge that the Hannemann administration’s rail plan is pretty much unchanged from the plan Hamayasu worked on as a young engineer in the 1970s during one of Mayor Frank Fasi’s administrations.

At that time, light rail technology was yet to be developed and heavy automated trains on elevated concrete platforms were really “state of the art” in transit planning, both technically and philosophically.

That is no longer the case, as technological developments and concepts of urban transportation have leapfrogged past the world of heavy rail. But, for reasons that remain murky, Hamayasu and the city are essentially clinging to their original Fasi-era plan. It’s not at all clear whether they are personally invested in their previous work and don’t want to let it go, or find it easier to incorporate the plans developed decades ago, or are just riding the momentum of those prior plans. For whatever reason, Mayor Hannemann’s administration is determined to plunge ahead into the past.