A couple of days ago, Henry Curtis (Ililani Media) walked through the available clues that should have provided some advance warning of Hawaiian Electric’s openness to a potential sale (“The Inside Scoop on HECO’s Four Year Death Cycle“). That is, if we had local business reporting that focused on in-depth understanding of the largest local companies and industries. My impression is that this in-depth and ongoing reporting isn’t part of the current assignments made by of our daily broadcast or print news.

Set against the backdrop of Hawaiian Electric’s jousting with the Public Utilities Commission and its difficulties in defining a forward-looking business plan, Curtis keyed on the role of HEI executive Alan Oshima.

Sometime in May 2014 Alan Oshima, Hawaiian Electric Industries (HEI) Executive Vice President (EVP) for corporate and community advancement received an additional job title as a member of the HECO Executive Team.

There was no public announcement made of Oshima’s new position.

This probably indicates that Nextera had made contact with HEI.

Oshima had a history of being involved in corporate mergers and reorganizations.

The first involved Citizens.

Frontier Communications Corporation was formerly known as Citizens Utilities Company (1935 – 2000) and then Citizens Communications Company (2000 – 2008).

In 2000 Citizens sought to sell their Kauai Electric Division to the newly formed Kauai Island Utility Cooperative (KIUC).

In Hawai`i Public Utilities Commission docket 2000-0108 Alan Oshima represented both the buyer and the seller. The deal was overpriced and was rejected by the Commission.

In 2002 the Public Utilities Commission opened docket 2002-0060 to review a second attempt by Citizens to sell their Kauai operations to KIUC. The price was lowered by nearly $100 million. Alan Oshima represented only the seller. The Commission approved the purchase.

In 2005 Oshima served as the lead Hawai`i regulatory counsel to the Carlyle Group in its acquisition of Verizon Hawaii.

Oshima served as Hawaiian Telcom’s General Counsel, Senior Vice President, and Corporate Secretary (2005-08).

In 2008 Oshima joined the HECO Board. During these HECO days, Oshima helped Hawaiian Telcom to emerge from reorganization in 2010. In 2011 Oshima moved to the HEI Board.

During May 2014, the month that Oshima received his new role, HECO CEO Richard M. Rosenblum announced that he would be gone within a year.

The clues were there, almost begging to be explored, but went unnoticed. And the result was shock and surprise when HEI suddenly announced that it had cut a merger deal with NextEra.

Local business reporting is far too often simply restating quarterly or annual financial results from company press releases, without much in the way of independent analysis.

I can clearly remember attending the 1994 conference of Investigative Reporters and Editors, my first experience to learn from other great reporters, and sitting in on a panel featuring Mary Fricker. She was a business writer for the Santa Rosa Press Democrat at the time, and I knew her name as one of the authors of a dynamite book about the savings and loan crisis, “Inside Job: The Looting of America’s Savings and Loans.” By the way, that’s still a great read if you can find a copy.

In any case, Fricker, who was assigned to cover banking, described her regular routine used to report on local area banks. She was an incredible document reporter, and she scoured all sorts of available financial reports, probably ending up knowing more about the condition of the banks than most bank executives, and certainly more than most business reporters.

Here’s the tip sheet that she distributed at that panel. It’s still a pretty impressive outline of what goes into this kind of comprehensive reporting.

When I went looking this morning, I found a couple of great items about Fricker.

One is a column based on a 2010 interview with Fricker, “Modest Mary, the reporter’s reporter.”

It begins:

Mary Fricker gets a girlish glee, even now at 69, when she speaks of her profession.

“I’m a reporter,” she nearly shrieks before running her hands spontaneously through her white hair and then raising her arms triumphantly.

All of us, regardless of career, should love our work as much as she loves being a newspaper reporter. And it’s the reporting — the investigating, the endless research — that she loves the most. She doesn’t fancy herself as a great writer.

I can’t help loving that description. It’s the way I felt about reporting when I had the luxury of a newspaper job. And I still feel it, on occasion. In any case, it’s a great column.

And then watch Fricker in this 2012 speech about reporting on the 2008 financial crisis. She confesses the sense of having failed her readers by failing to understand the potential for a collapse of the financial system. She holds out a very high standard for business and financial reporting, the kind of reporting that might have seen the sale of Hawaiian Electric hidden in plain sight among the various layers of corporate documents and actions.

And so it goes on this Sunday morning.