Have you been watching the overlap slowing developing between the Star-Advertiser and Raycom’s Hawaii News Now broadcast conglomerate?

The first thing I noticed on the Star-Advertiser’s web site was that the Star-Advertiser’s list of headlines from all the local television stations was replaced by a single listing of stories from Hawaii News Now. Gone are links to any other local news sources.

Now they’ve added a separate list with links to Hawaii News Now videos on the S-A online edition front page. And on that list today: “Interview: Richard Borreca of the Honolulu Star-Advertiser”

Then I clicked through to the S-A story on the Senate confirmation hearing for Sabrina McKenna. Immediately beneath the text of the story is an embedded video, simply titled, “Senate committee approves Supreme Court pick”. No indication of the source. Click on the video and you get a 15-second ad followed by the Hawaii News Now story on the hearing.

Meanwhile, over at the Hawaii News Now web site, there’s a listing of Star-Advertiser headlines, and that Borreca interview appears in the list of recent HNN stories.

When I clicked through to the HNN Senate confirmation story, you can read Jim Mendoza’s story or watch the video. Interestingly, there are no visible links back to the Star-Advertiser.

Another thing you notice–Hawaii News Now has a lot more online advertising than the Star-Advertiser, including some ads that could easily be mistaken for links to news stories, despite the grayed out disclaimer.

So I can’t help wondering if this is the extent of the relationship, or are we going to see more integration and consolidation of the two news products in the months ahead? Does more cooperation translate into less news?