A reader left this comment yesterday:
Ian, did you notice that Civil Beat has subtly changed its layout?
There is a sports, business and entertainment section of Civil Beat which I only noticed today, although it might have been there for a while or always, for all I know.
Likewise, the Media section has been lowered to the bottom right of the layout, replaced by Breaking News that include international events.
I might have missed all this earlier, but it seems to be to be brand new and unannounced to the public.
If this is brand new, then in regards to the Star Advertiser … this means war!
If Civil Beat does engage in some advertising to supplement its expansion, then that would mean the beginning of the end for the SA’s hegemony (the SA no longer has a monopoly on news, it is merely dominant now that CB has expanded its focus).
A quick look at Civil Beat seems to confirm that they’re kicking up the competition a notch or two. Here’s one ad prominently displayed:
The link takes you directly to a list of comparisons. A little self serving, as you would expect, but it highlights Civil Beat’s strengths. “Staff journalists 100% dedicated to investigative news,” “Washington D.C. bureau,” and more.
And there are lots of signs of activity. Civil Beat says they’re hiring, and other “why buy the paper?” ads are sprinkled through the site.
Can they pull off this direct challenge to the Star-Advertiser, with its much larger staff of reporters and editors? Keep watching.
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More power to them!
The S-A really is a poor paper with very skimpy coverage. I took advantage of the half price “birthday” offer Civil Beat had a couple of months ago.
What a website with very in-depth articles on critical issues that affect our local lives.
— Kevin Talbot
Civil Beat has already replaced the SA. A newspaper owned by a Canadian doesn’t have the best interest of Hawai’i, only profit at the expense of Journalism. MidWeek for the most part offers very poor journalism. I do enjoy the vets humor.
But a website owned by a mainland billionaire and mainland editor has the best interest of Hawaii? I’d say they’re in it for the glory and for their own name brand.
I’m all for more sources of news in Hawaii, but to say that the kind of arrogant journalism that Civil Beat brings fills the void of what’s truly been missing for the people of Hawaii is a joke.
Good to see that Civil Beat has their game face on.
The only really vexing thing for me about Civil Beat are the pointless, useless and annoying scroll bars within each section of the homepage. Aren’t the scroll bars just so dumb? They do not save any real space at all, and one has to fuss with them just to read the title of the final article. There should be just one scroll bar — on the right side of the homepage, just like on this and all other websites. That means that the layout would be longer, but we could read it without fiddling with all those darn scroll bars.
Also, I appreciate the absence of advertising on the homepage layout. It’s nice and clean. But I really would not mind advertising on the individual articles. In fact, I am used to it and it feels normal. In fact, I wish they had advertising on the articles, but hope they keep advertising off of the main page.
But again, those scroll bars are the worst. It’s like Chinese water torture every time I visit Civil Beat.
Huh? Why, exactly, do you wish there were ads on the individual article pages? That strikes me as a bizarre desire.
By the way, the future of online journalism might involve complex collaboration among multiple news outlets.
In the blog Disappears News, Larry Geller talks about this in the blog entry “Alternative media press pool for Aloun trial in second week”.
http://www.disappearednews.com/2011/08/alternative-media-press-pool-for-aloun.html
I guess we will find out how open Civil Beat is to such collaboration. That might depend on how determined they are to compete with the SA.
Mahalo for the write-up Ian. It’s true – Civil Beat is expanding our team and coverage in the interest of providing local news junkies a choice.
We think we can give them a run for their money, as long as readers like you and your blog followers keep giving us feedback on how be better.
Thats one of my favorite advantages over the paper – we only have to make our readers happy.
No advertisers to please.
Have a great weekend! – Dan, Community Host, CivilBeat.com
At the risk of being snarky, Dan, one area for improvement that’s obvious is proof-reading your own blog comments (e.g., “how be better,” “thats”).
Hi Dave – I should have known better than to rush a response without proof-reading it. Especially with the tight ship that the editors at Civil Beat run in terms of edited work.
Thank you for your attention.
My main local news interest is politics and while Civil Beat has improved its coverage, I think their people are still amateurish compared to a reporter like Derrick DePledge.
OTOH, the editorials of the Star-Advertiser are offensively insipid and CB’s are less self-important, more thoughtful.
I LIKE competition. Capitalism without competition deadens the human spirit and everything else it touches.
The decision of the Star-Advertiser to wall itself off from Google searches renders it almost useless to me.
I guess they own our history? Can I extract from their archives all the information and quotes I have provided their reporters over the years? Or does that all belong to them?
In Orwell’s novel, 1984, history belonged to the State and the hero’s job was to use a computer to go back and revise the historical record. Today, much of Hawaii’s history is archived in the newspaper archives of the Advertiser, Star-Bulletin and, now, the Star-Advertiser. Orwell had it wrong, but only slightly. It is the corporations, lumbering monopolies, which will own, and revise, our history, not the State.
Oh, “and charge the people a dollar and a half just to see ’em. Don’t it always seem to go….”
Just took out a subscription for a year.
To which competitor?
Just thought of something.
The US/world could be going back into a recession.
This time, there won’t be any stimulus.
It gets worse. The luxury goods market has been picking up steam, while Walmart languishes because ordinary Americans have been running out of money. But now the luxury goods market might tank (again). That is, what ‘recovery’ we have had has been biased and warped toward the rich. Now even that may whither.
What will this mean for the SA? In the depths of the last recession, the number of people in my neighborhood subscribing to the newspaper declined dramatically, if the delivery boy’s routine is any indication. Nowadays, that kid just zips through the neighborhood hitting only a couple of houses, whereas once upon a time he once used to carefully plod from house to house.
There is the possibility that ordinary people will not be able to subscribe to any news service, be it in print or online, the SA or CB.
This might be fatal to the SA’s print edition and its online coverage. CB likewise will have to lower or end its subscription and perhaps utilize some form of advertising.
How will this alter news reading habits? Rather than luxuriate with a Sunday morning paper, there will be a shift to scanning different news sources. So something like All Hawaii News, and news aggregator, would become more popular, and perhaps the SA and CB would evolve toward that. (Also, this might include an aggregation of blogs, like Ian’s blogroll.)
But it looks like with its new subscription model, the SA might have just stepped out into a perfect storm of economic downturn, changing reading habits, generational change and changing technology.
Oh yeah, how will this recession hurt everything else, including all this biofuels and energy stuff that you have been blogging about?
The SA disables comments on key articles that may be controversial or embarrassing to establishment or businesses. This is the worst of their editorial functions in my opinion. More should be made of this stifling of dialog on our “paper of record”. Then again, CB doesn’t allow anonymous comments, so most can’t talk about the real dynamics of issues lest they offend their plantation lunas. Thank goodness for the indi blogs that seem to strike a balance, but we do need broader scale discourse. What to do…
Although I certainly support the concepts behind Civil Beat, I decided to take a pass on it because it requires people to post comments on its Facebook page rather than on the site.
I don’t do Facebook for a variety of reasons nor do I twit, but it seems to me to force people to go to another site is a MASSIVE waste of time.
Re the Star-Advertiser and the previous versions: I stopped reading the Comments sections years.
We went back to a (real) subscription last year because of the popups, slow-w-w-w-w downloads, and flashing ads. It’s fun to read a (real) paper these days, but the quality of some of the reporting sucks.
Off to the Reapportionment Commission meeting.
A “war”. Don’t see one in my lifetime…..or for certain in the next 10 or 15 years. The SA has somewhere between 120,000 and 140,000 PAYING customers that has been verified by the national auditing arm for newspapers. Here’s the big question: how many paying folks does cb have?? They won’t say and likely for good reason. If thetY had wheels, a grenade thrown into the room like Ian lobbed today would have HUNDREDS of comments instead of the old reliable posters. Even when Temple writes his embarrassing comments about them they only get a few comments…..most of which come from staff or relatives. The haters will take this wrong but what’s wrong with having both succeed? We all bitch about having only one paper and if they went away and you were left with just cb would the community be better off? I don’t see why the SA would even pat attention to them. I still don’t understand their business model. I can’t imagine they have enough in the coffers to even pay JT’s salary, let alone all the operational costs and the payroll for the other 9 or 10 staffers. I think they also are making a significant tactical error by bragging about not having any advertising…..my guess is at some point if they ever get to a scale they can publicly announce that might change. Why box yourself into a corner so early into the game….er… “war”. Put me down as rooting for all media in this town to survive….our immediate future appears bleak. We are gonna need them all.
Agree with Next Generation…. can’t we all get along? Seems to me that the readers of cb and this site don’t get that advertising is information too…. Take a close look at last sunday ‘s paper…..despite the barbs…..the SA looks pretty healthy to me. I applaud the SA for not returning the insults that the leadership of CB hurls out on a regular basis. They are embarrassing themselves and should just let their work speak for themselves. I say, everyone should play nice.
What is this “Star Advertiser” of which you speak?
I recall vaguely a newspaper with that name a while back but nobody much cared when it slipped behind a paywall and passed into a well deserved anonymity.
Civil Beat declined to participate in our pool for the Aloun case, but that is fine. They were prepared to have someone in the courtroom every day and didn’t need our notes. Their presence and live blogging was a much more important and effective thing to do than to simply share paper notes.
As a result of the court order, everyone got to use Sara Lin’s live blogging without restriction, and I’m pretty sure that Sara contibuted to several stories that way in other media. She certainly kept interest in the case alive. [Note that the S-A relegated it to a short article on the third page of the Local section when they printed anything at all.]
John Temple kindly offered to share advance copies of their material with several “real” news organizations –and– Disappeared News, for which I am grateful. It was a generous thing to do.
Now, there is no real competition for a print paper except for another print paper, because of demographic differences and penetration. CB will not be delivered to senior citizens’ doorsteps unless they buy themselves a printing press. Interestingly, their terms of service don’t rule out being printed on paper.
But why should they mimic a print newspaper? For them, the possibilities are endless. If they are interested in paper, they could go print-on-demand. Letter size paper is down to about 1 1/2 cents a page printing costs, maybe lower by now. Imagine a “Civil Beat Dispenser” at your local supermarket. My point is that they can do whatever they want, and whatever they calculate will produce a sustainable business. Maybe, as Hawaii catches up with the rest of the country on iPad ownership, the paper issue won’t matter much anyway. I’ve read the NY Times on my Tablet PC for many years now, I wouldn’t want to lug it home and then back to the recycling bin.
We are at a cusp, a point where Civil Beat and Hawaii Reporter are growing, learning, and developing. The Star-Advertiser is cost-cutting, at times biased, and stuck with a particular business model (paper). Their future is not bright, IMHO. They can’t even print IMHO, actually. The seniors wouldn’t understand it. LOL.
I can’t say enough good things about The Civil Beat. Since the merger of our two large papers into the editorial mess that the Star-Advertiser has become, the quality of news gathering and suppression of certain stories has brome common place. I still can’t believe the Star-Advertiser has refused to report on Councilman Nestor Garcia’s no-show job with rail interests that paid more than his councilmans job, while being the swing vote for rail. That can’t be an accident.
The Star-Advertisers new lead-lined pay wall is a baffling move, as it seems to intentionally make them less relevent as they avoid google and even hide their editorials behind it… Which is a paradoxical thing to do when you are attempting to sway public opinion.
The Civil Beat is a great resource to find unfiltered and unvarnished news of of City and State. Their reporting style reminds me of the late Tim Russert, who would ask hard questions and if the politician tried to avoid the question, would politely ask it again. That is the rarest sort of journalism these days.
The Civil Beat nicely complements Ian’s blog, as well well as Carroll Cox, David Shapiro, and Disappeared News. We are lucky to have them all.
The Star-Advertisers new lead-lined pay wall is a baffling move, as it seems to intentionally make them less relevent.