These hotel telephones used to provide a convenient way to keep in touch during hotel stays around the world. With nearly universal access to cell phones and included long distance service, these have lost their utility, but remain as reminders of travel during a less-tethered age.
Our room in Millbrae, near the San Francisco airport, features a desk phone in the sitting area, another in the bedroom, and one mounted on the wall next to the toilet for those calls that were too important to miss.
I’m sure that these once brought a steady income stream to both hotel operators and telephone providers which has now evaporated.
Similarly, newspapers lost much of their financial base when real estate, help-wanted, and auto advertising migrated to less expansive (or free) and more widely viewed online sites. At one time, these sources of income would underwrite the costs of producing the news.
And newspapers are still struggling to find an equivanet, steady income stream in this new and still rapidly changing media environment. When all is said and done, that’s why I don’t blame local newsrooms for failing to meet standards set back when owning a newspaper was a license to print money, and editors could throw lots of bodies at big breaking stories, or invest in long-term projects. It’s a different ball game these days.
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I feel quite comfortable expecting newsrooms to meet reasonable standards, and it doesn’t always boil down to shrinking revenue. Sometimes it boils down to simple greed and a lack of ethics, and quite often to plain incompetence and hypocrisy.
Newspapers have generally been a force for good in terms of helping people stay informed. But that hasn’t always been the case, certainly not in Hawaii. Sometimes newspapers (and all other forms of media) have been abusive and downright despicable, and caused serious harm to communities. That’s precisely why high, or at least reasonable, expectations are so important regardless of any financial strife.
Hawaii’s newspapers typically flunk badly when it comes to coverage of their own doings and difficulties. They can be great pontificators about honesty and transparency — except when it comes to themselves and the public trust they gratuitously presume.
Please take a look at the current labor unrest at The Maui News. HNN had a story last night about an informational picket there, something not often seen on the Valley Isle. Nothing in the paper today.
Go figure.
Hawaii needs higher expectations and more critical review of its mass media, not lower and less.
Perhaps now more than ever.
Your story makes me a little more empathetic to the need for other means of revenues for the local news folks, but it is super annoying when they post a story online with a pic of what looks to be like a local person, and when you click on it, it is in Minnesota or somewhere….with lots of ads below the story. I wish they would add “NATIONAL” to the taglines.
My neighbor calls the Star- Advertiser yesterdays news. Seem appropriate?