Most of you who follow my entries here at iLind.net probably don’t remember the beginning of it all.

That was on September 15, 1999. Next weekend, it will have been 20 years. At that time, I was an investigative reporter for the old Honolulu Star-Bulletin, which was the junior partner in a Joint Operating Agreement with the larger Honolulu Advertiser, at that time owned by Gannett.

Here’s the first entry in what I called the Newsroom Diary, written before “blogs” were a thing, and even before the term “blog” was in general use. Over the first few months, my observations appeared as part of a small personal site, at that point using the free space provided by Roadrunner, which at that point provided our broadband service.

September 15, Wednesday

My first day back after a week-long trip to Chicago. The normal first day routine: clearing all that stacked up email, then the snail mail, then returning calls, getting reoriented to the stories in progress.

Routine, until mid-afternoon, probably around 4 pm, a wave of worry. Unexplained management meetings. No answers forthcoming about the subject. Finally word that “an announcement” will be made Thursday morning. We’ve been through rumors before. A month ago, some Advertiser staffers were supposedly asked to submit lists of who they would hire from the Star-Bulletin, but as far as I know this was never confirmed. But by 6 pm, all television stations are reporting the Star-Bulletin’s imminent closure.

Reporters who start early in the day were gone before the flutter started, and many hear the news for the first time when it’s broadcast.

Over the next 18 months, I tried to document what it felt and looked like within a daily newspaper as we seemed to be sailing into journalistic oblivion. I thought that bearing witness to the death of another American newspaper would be a good use of the time I had left as a professional journalist.

The “iLind.net” domain was registered several months later, in late January 2000, and the “newsroom diary” moved here. Of course, the newspaper didn’t close. It was purchased and continued publishing under new ownership, although I lost my job in the process. I turned freelance, writing first for Honolulu Weekly and, later, Civil Beat. And I continued posting here at iLind.net, which has been through many different phases over the years since.

In the last year, I’ve become less regular with my almost-daily posts, which has made me consider how or whether to continue when the two-decade anniversary arrives next weekend.

My internal jury is still out.