Dave Shapiro’s column on local news, noted here yesterday, drew this long reply from former Honolulu Advertiser reporter and editorial writer Peter Rosegg.
Rosegg is currently a communications specialist and public spokesman for Hawaiian Electric Company.
He is a also very thoughtful person with a lot of journalism experience, so I’m sharing his comment in full.
When I was a daily journalist, folks who complained about local newspapers often compared them to the New York Times or Boston Globe.
“Look out the window,” I said, “It is not New York you see out there.”
In short, meaningless comparison. Dave Shapiro’s comments about television news are correct, but so what? Even the most ardent fan of local commercial broadcast news would agree it is at best a headline service, formulaic and driven by glitz and personality in pursuit of ratings. Some do it better than others and, frankly, I like Hawaii News Now, as I do the veterans on KITV.
So the reduction in television news shows from four (or was it five?) to three is a different subject than the collapse of two daily newspapers into one. The qualitative transition from five to three television news shows matters little. (That it gives some print journalists, in their misery, a good feeling to attack TV headline news for being what it is seems kind of pitiful.)
Television “news” is to print journalism as apples are to oranges, or apples to tire irons. A lack of clarity in our language allows them both to share the same name. They should not.
Another linguistic confusion clouds discussion around newspaper consolidation and demise. What does having two editorial voices really, mean? Inside the newsroom, editorial is distinguished from news, features and sports. Outside, “editorial” lumps all those together in contrast to the business side of the enterprise, where ads and subscriptions are sold. With two newspapers so similar (in attitude and the audience they seek, if not in resources or staff size) what about two “editorial voices” is there to protect?
Back in the day, when George Chaplin and Bud Smyser were editors (and Twigg-Smith or the Farringtons were publishers) people in the community knew who had responsibility for unsigned editorials. Today, does anyone know (or care) who is responsible for an unsigned editorial? When is the last time you heard anyone say, “Did you see what the Advertiser said about that today?” Even if you know that Jim Kelly is now editorial page editor, it’s been a long time, I am guessing.
But every day you hear, “Did you see Lee Cataluna’s column? She really gets it.” or “She really stuck it to whomever.” (This must lead to some interesting moments around the Cataluna-Kelly diner table.) In short, amid the endless flood of opinion on the web, talk television and talk radio – and in newspapers – signed opinion with a point of view can still get attention. (It’s another good reason for Peer News to disallow the unsigned comment.)
But the unsigned editorial, even in prestigious national newspapers, is losing or has lost its potency. It has become a waste of valuable newsprint. Two editorial voices in Honolulu? Since when? And who cares?
What we need to protect is trained news gathering – independent but edited — with the resources of time, legal support and computer power that can be brought to bear on reporting and analysis.
It was I believe George Orwell who said, and Bill Moyers who latterly repeated, “Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed: everything else is public relations.”
As a public relations guy AND former daily journalist, I believe there should be space in the daily newspaper for public information AND journalism. There is nothing wrong with that.
But is has been a long time since either newspaper really fulfilled the role of a newspaper, described by Finley Peter Dunne as to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted.” I will hate to see a day when the newspaper is all “what someone wants printed” and none of “what someone does not,” but we have been heading that way for a long time, one newspaper or two.
A lot of things have contributed to the current state of affairs, but one of them for sure is the sense of self importance in the minds of editors and publishers who believe that daily newspapers must continue to provide “wisdom” of unsigned editorials — long, long after they have ceased to be of value to readers.
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To Peter: Fabulous insights. Thank you.
To Ian: Thanks for sharing this.
That was excellent perspective and I really appreciated the quote about news versus public relations. Right on!
Among the long-term values of a daily newspaper, at least from a historical aspect, is that it’s the only daily chronical of where we live.
You don’t get that with TV news. Broadcast news is perishable and, for the most part, not archived except by third parties.
Newspapers have a long tradition of archiving themselves. The stories and photos from each edition are recorded on microfilm (or nowadays saved as PDF files) and filed away for future reference.
The State’s library system has microfilms dating back to the beginning of each paper. And both the Star-Bulletin and Advertiser have independent libraries with hard copy and digital versions of the coverage given to a huge variety of events that took place in our communities.
Hopefully it’s this wide range of coverage, of both hard news and fluff pieces, that will continue long after we’ve become a one-newspaper town. It’s always been the best and most accessible record of where we’ve been.
I thought most of the pre-2001 Star-Bulletin archive was retained by the Advertiser and the money wasn’t spent to make a copy.
So I was under the impression that the Star-Bulletin did not have it’s own independent archive going back over the century, although it has an excellent online archive of Starbulletin.com.
Am I wrong about that?
Thank you, Ian, for running Peters commentary.
Just a quick addition to Dean’s comment, though: The archive would serve us better if it were accurate. Unfortunately, at least for the Advertiser, it is not. Errors are not corrected, stories are selective in their coverage. Whether bias, omission, inexperience, or short-staffing results in the imperfections, they remain as an archive for future generations. The omissions can be as important as what gets into the archive.
That’s where the paper’s management influences the coure of events well into the future. It probably has always been that way everywhere, and no reason to think our local papers are not doing the same.
Hence perhaps the desire of the right-wing Grassroot (sic) folks to actually own a paper newspaper by purchasing the Star-Bulletin. It isn’t, I think, to further journalistic ideals, but to further their own goals.
Fortunately, Larry, although not nearly as convenient, archives of past newspaper editions are available in their entirety via microfilm at the library.
I was talking with friends last weekend about the newspaper archives. Maybe the S-B archives could be turned over to the UH Library for safe-keeping, maintenance and public access?
And since Orwell was mentioned, let me say I would not be pleased at the prospect of the Slom-Zimmerman couple having control over a sizable chunk of the historical record.
Maybe Black can be prevailed upon to grant it to UH? Or Pierre Omidyar, as a goodwill gift to the community, can provide a grant for this purpose? Sort of a way of saying to the community: we are helping the technology of news change, but we also respect the importance of what was accomplished with the older technology.
It would generate a lot of good will for his new project.
Peter Rosegg has initiated here the thoughtful process reqired to address the critical impending challenge to ¨protect trained news gathering.¨ Bob Krauss on a slow news day would simply percolate some coffee in his office or apartment by Iolani School and access some other parts of the century while a robust Twentieth Century Honolulu Advertiser news staff would carry on. In a chance meeting with Bob Krauss at the don´t walk signal at South King St and South St on the morning after Hurricane Iwa in 1982 had knoked out 99 percent of all power throughout Oahu from 6:30 the night before until HECO was able to provide power for television news at just after 10 he volunteered to me that the one radio station in town broadcasting that night because it was prepared with a gasoline generator was the most unprofessional thing he had heard.
Actually, as thousands of listeners know, that night radio-dash-news, an oxy-dash-moron to most print journalists, had seldom sounded better! Iwa was a HECO story that night and Doug Carlson, the public relations professional HECO spokesman performed superbly, right in the KGU studio across fromwhere its General Manger Brian Loughrin and I were madly fielding four office phones. KGU that night had triple the 33 per cent available audience ratings Moffat & Jacobs had ever achieved at KPOI.
The new HECO spokesman by the time a similar severe low pressure system blindsided power lines at Makakilo the night bofore the 2008 New Years Eve is indeed the professional journalist Peter Rosegg, stated above, reassuring us in 2008 on Perry & Price.
Bob Krauss was absolutely right. But Peter Rosegg, himself an Advertiser veteran from print media, establishes in the commentary above that there is a separate standard for TV-dash-news.
Actually there are at least seven standards: not just for print news, but for magazines like Honolulu; for TV like the Hawaii News Now at KGMB that Peter sheepishly confesses liking; for the internet which can frequently reach the standads of Ian´s December 30 entry; for film making the likes of Edgy Lee´s; for books (even Norman Reyes of KHVH-TV and radio wrote a
good book now in the stacks at Main Branch); and for radio.
But radio-dash-news requires timing. You don´t want to be in radio news on those days when there is nothing to report that most of your radio listeners would in their way find the least interesting; its better to just give it up and become a member of the unpaid KSSK posse. The City Prosecutor Peter Carlyle, picketing on South King and Punchbowl one morning in support of proposition 3 on a November ballot waited till 7:37 and speed-dialed Perry & Price with his free hand and instantly had the full attention Michael W. Perry and all the rest of us.
If Perry Price were to suddenly disappear like the Hawaii Super Ferry, Sadam Hussein would reach up from his little hiding place underneath the Honolulu Weekly rack at South King and Puchbowl and cause traffic havoc!
Ian, Thanks for printing Peter’s comments. Good food for thought, and one can never beat Orwell. I also really enjoyed the quote from Dunne. The comments were fine as well, and thanks for pointing out elsewhere how nice it would have been to have some coverage on the Hybrid Upgrade.
Hi, Dan.
Hope you’re well.
We should talk.