Lots of tittering being heard around town after CNN’s senior White House correspondent, Ed Henry, took aim at Honolulu’s monopoly newspaper with a widely-reprinted column, “The Honolulu Star-Advertiser is Dead to Me.”
The Star-Advertiser led the incident off with a brief editorial aside, “Reporting live, in my Hawaiian shirt.” In a very short space, this little item dismissed news from the assembled White House correspondents as “fluff” and implied the press corps hides out in Waikiki while the real work, if any, is waiting elsewhere.
Henry took offense, as seems fair, and answered back in kind.
Ah, a charge of fluff from a newspaper whose front page on the very same day had a hard-hitting lead story headlined “Ahi stuck here for the holidays,” which bemoaned the fact that bad weather on the East Coast means less ahi tuna is being shipped out of of Hawaii. The story was so large that it was the only story on the front page.
Stop the presses.
Henry adds substance as well. Reporters stay in Waikiki because Kailua doesn’t have the visitor infrastructure to support “such a large group.” He points out White House staff also stay in Waikiki and, like reporters, shuttle to Kailua when needed.
The worst part is that the Star-Advertiser item mouths the same “no one goes to Hawaii to do real work” viewpoint that we criticize when it comes from mainlanders attacking official travel to conferences and conventions held here. And this from the state’s largest newspaper. Ouch!
Anyway, it’s an instructive little tiff, and it’s getting lots of retweets and links, showing up on places like Politico.com and elsewhere.
You’ve got to wonder what bored S-A staff penned the non-bylined item and what they have to say about it in the light of another morning.
Discover more from i L i n d
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Another example of the quality that results from a monopoly.
The local yokels versus the big boys. SA should not have tried this when they were leading with “Ahi stuck here for the holidays” which draws an unfortunate parallel with all the folks stuck on the East Coast.
A snowbound editor friend of mine had several creative suggestions about what the SA could do with their ahi, none of them culinary.
Hell hath no fury like a CNN Reporter scorned!
Not much to say except the rain really clogged the brains of Star Advertiser good. I canceled our SA subscription a long time ago.
Hawaii is a great place for conferences and meetings.
But why is “no one goes to Hawaii to do real work” a problem? It’s true. We’d like to be something else, but we’re not there yet.
Fact check. Hawaii simply is what it is. Love it for what it is.
Same for the Star-Advertiser. Ahi as a front-page story is par for the course. It’s not likely to change. In many ways, the S-A aggregates the news very well. It’s a magazine format, that’s what the editors/publishers want. So you get big pictures on the front page instead of print, you get ads covering half of it, and if we’re lucky, Black Press won’t pull the plug on it.
Nevermind that the format didn’t work for the Star-Bulletin, this is what they are offering us. It’s a different form of newspaper. Why is no one highlighting the ways it is better than its predecessors?
“He points out White House staff also stay in Waikiki and, like reporters, shuttle to Kailua when needed.”
what da… are reporters and White House personnel a girl scout troupe? is news reportage and white house presidential matters not important enough to justify people having their own cars for expediency’s sake? they need to hop onto a tour van and trudge over the pali en masse? Only to result in the all same same pics and paragraphs by different reporters. hmmm.
They are all lodged at the Moana. BUT! cannot secure individual autos for their own personal use, in order to, what I assumed was a reporter’s job; “Get the scoop, get it first or get fired”…
Good points Larry. To answer your question on why no one is highlighting anything positive about the SA, that’s because it is more along Ian’s approach to only post things that take shots at the SA. Like the print form of sensational headlines to “sell more papers”, Ian knows if he posts something negative about the SA then he will get lots of comments. This is in contrast to his last five to seven days worth of posts where almost no one had any comment….he is a clever man that Ian, he knows what his flock clamor for.
Yes, Ian is very smart. If you were smart like Ian, you would probably see that it’s laughable for someone to whine that the SA is taking “shots” when the CNN blog was a response to shots that were FROM the SA against CNN.
If you were smart like Ian, you would also read your own comment and laugh at the pseudo-logic that Ian made this post because his posts during Christmas were too nice and didn’t get enough attention!!!!
Some people at the SA freak out over any criticism of the newspaper. They have a sad interpretation of the First Amendment. It’s not going to stop the criticism.
Looks like we’re stuck with the Ahi and the Starvertiser.
I just recently moved here and have lived in nearly a dozen cities the size of Honolulu. Frankly, I like the paper. In my humble opinion, it is better than most I’ve read across the country where I have settled. I can say one thing for certain though, it is the thing to do to constantly point out your own local newspaper’s shortcomings. It just isn’t much fun to talk about stories they nailed. I also, notice TV news always escapes any scrutiny. The SA gets harpooned for an Ahi story while my morning newscast looks more like a play at the local theatre. Go figure….
I could take shots at the S-A myself, I dislike quite a bit of the presentation. Much of what they do I find better even than the Advertiser. I am actually so conflicted that I’ve written almost nothing on it on my own little blog.
We also debated renewing, but in the end we did renew our sub (that’s a story in itself I should write about, actually).
It’s certainly complicated. Whatever the S-A is or isn’t, it’s now our only daily newspaper in Honolulu.
I sat on my mouse and didn’t write what I thought of the Graying of Hawaii and Felix series. In fact, I’m not going to say anything more here. Just that it’s uncomfortable sitting on a mouse for a long time.
Oh, on driving to Kailua, I haven’t tried it myself, but the one report I got back was that it’s hard to park near the prez. A bus sounds like a better deal. The driver dumps the crew out, picks them up later, and there’s a dry space inside to hang out in the rain and wait and talk. Or so I imagine.
As the guy who helped write the New Year’s ahi story — why is anyone surprised? This story comes around every year at this time, as it’s part of Hawaii’s unique culture. Also, the fishing industry is an important part of Hawaii’s economy.
Ahi story was great. Front page? The east coast won’t understand it however. Hawaiians worried about raw fish while tens of thousands of people are stuck in airports. Jon Stewart material.
I agree with Burl, the ahi story–especially during the slow holiday news season–is a worthy front page story.
It’s hypocritical for us to sit back and bash the paper for not being everything we want it to be. We’ve taken to reading the articles free of charge from the website, canceling subscriptions, and robbing it of revenue. Eventually the Honolulu Advertiser shuts its doors and we lose about 100 journalists–probably more than a third of the total reporting power in Hawaii. Then we complain that what’s left doesn’t read like the New York Times. But the blame doesn’t just fall on the reader’s shoulders.
Memo to David Black: by putting Star-Advertiser articles online for free you are hastening your own demise. Even a nominal subscription rate could be a huge windfall. If porn can make money online, so can a venerable newspaper.
We didn’t know when writing the story that it would wind up on the front page. That’s beyond my pay grade. I don’t know that it was “worthy” of the front page, but you run with what you have. We don’t run a newspaper to appease complainers, but to serve the readers.
The combined industries of agriculture, forestry, fishing and hunting make up LESS THAN 1% of the Hawaii economy, according to the US Bureau of Economic Analysis.
http://hawaii.gov/dbedt/info/economic/databook/2009-individual/13/130509.pdf
Fishing is an important part of the state economy? Important enough to be the only story on the front page of Honolulu’s only daily newspaper? Another poor, defensive argument from a paper that deserves criticism for its coverage.