It wasn’t an auspicious beginning.
Yesterday, Hawaii’s news industry underwent a seismic shift, with the sale of the Honolulu Star-Advertiser, along with its immediate parent company, Oahu Publications, Inc., which publishes the newspapers on Kauai and Hawaii Island, and the chain of well over 100 other newspapers formerly owned by Canadian publisher David Black. Although the sale has potentially widespread implications for news consumers, advertisers, and communities across the state, you wouldn’t know it as a reader of the Star-Advertiser.
When I got up early Friday morning, I checked in with the headlines at Google News, and quickly ran into a link to a story about the sale in the Star-Advertiser. I clicked through to read how the newspaper reported the change. This is what appeared.
I searched Staradvertiser.com. Nothing to be found.
So I went outside and brought in the print version, which was waiting in our driveway. I found the story, published without a byline, buried inside at the bottom of page 11.
And it was really just a smiley-face press release, not a piece of business reporting.
But even that meager reporting was effectively and efficiently scrubbed from the online version.
So the shift in ownership to a newspaper company that hails from the deep South isn’t off to a good start, at least if you regularly turn to the daily newspaper for news.
It shouldn’t have been a surprise. Throughout the several months between the time that Black Press filed in a Canadian court for protection from its creditors, and through the process leading up to Friday’s transfer of ownership, the newspaper failed to cover its own story. Interested readers had to turn to reporting by the publisher of a small community newspaper in Canada, and a Seattle-area news blog.
Looking back, the transition in March 2001, when David Black closed on his purchase of the “old” Honolulu Star-Bulletin, it was very different.
The first day of publication under Black’s ownership featured extensive reporting on the deal and its impact, going far beyond the kind of puff-piece journalism reflected in Friday’s single buried-and-then-disappeared story.
Three reporters had been assigned to the story, and they did their job. They dug into the story and reported. Click on the beginning of the tale, below, to see all that was printed that day about the transfer of ownership.
Sadly, the Star-Advertiser, under new ownership, failed its first test.
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How about investigating and report on the type of reporting from this News media that has occurred in its Southern states? Most certainly Black publications were biased.
Opi did not own the Kapolei printing facility, Tradewind capital owns it and was leasing it to Opi for $250,000 per month. What kind of deal did Carpenter make to continue leasing the print facility? A rather important component of publishing a daily newspaper.
Currently out of state in a CDT location so I read the article online at around 8 AM CDT (3 AM HST) on 3/22/2024. It was behind the paywall for Hawai?i news.
As best I recall it was an upbeat story mostly featuring quotations from Dennis Francis about how great things were going to be. It included some brief background information on Carpenter as well as the many other newspapers owned by Black that were being sold. No mention of layoffs. No mention of the Kapolei printing plant. No mention of the ransomware payment.
Wsic must have read a different news brief than the one I read. There were zero quotes from Francis talking about “how good things will be”….fake news? It was a boiler plate press release as I recall. Frankly that’s about as much as it deserved.
Most news media have difficulty reporting on themselves. I’d love to see a list any worthy journalism coming out of the Star-Advertiser so far this year. I get a physical paper six days a week but am not the most diligent reader. I totally missed the buried story on the new ownership with the same old management. Maybe it was buried because it won’t mean much … or because it’s really just more bad news about the state of today’s journalism.
Fascinating to read the 2001 coverage. We were so innocent back then with no idea what the future held. Both companies merged in 2010. We’re all so jaded now. Hardly anyone bats an eye anymore with all these private companies struggling to survive. It’s now the 6th largest U.S. daily newspaper by print circulation!
Death by own hand. Not unlike local tv news, advertising take-over is totally unattractive.
Is Civil Beat better at keeping the readers up to date on the various Omidyar business interests, it’s own staff layoffs/consolidations, etc? Link some stories if you can you prove it.
Billionaires gonna billionaire, amiright?