Category Archives: Media

Judiciary communications director will be missed

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“Putting a # # # on my career”
That was the subject line on an email earlier this month from Jan Kagehiro, director of communications and community relations for the state Judiciary, announcing her upcoming retirement. She officially steps down at the end of the month, but has already had a retirement party at work.

The “XXX” is the Roman numeral for 30, the symbol traditionally used by reporters to mark the end of a story, and now marking the end of Kagehiro’s career.

So this is a special shoutout thanking Jan for her work as the vital liaison between the courts and the community of news reporters who, I’m sure, often put her in stressful and sometimes awkward positions.

She has been extremely helpful to me as a reporter and blogger, troubleshooting issues when I had problems maneuvering through the Judiciary’s online data system, assisting in obtaining court records when I was working on stories, and providing a “heads up” when their regular systems were going down for maintenance. I’m sure she’s been a key contact for many others reporting on the courts throughout her years at the judiciary.

She’s been helpful, friendly, responsive, and always accessible, performing at the highest level. And much, much appreciated.

Right to the end, when her retirement announcement included this note: “If we don’t have someone in this position by then, I will provide you with an alternative means to get assistance.”

Even after regular purging of my emails, I see nearly 300 communications from Jan since she started at the Judiciary in 2017.

Jan had a long career in public relations before landing with the courts. The first news item I could locate was from September 1983 whebn she was Sports Information Director for Chaminade Universty.

In August 1998, she was named an executive vp at Communications Pacific, and a year later promoted to account supervisor.

Then in November 1989, she jointed Amfac/JMB Hawaii as vp for communications, and was there at least through December 1991.

She then moved to become media relations representative for Kaiser health sytems, later moving up to director of member and marketing communications.

In April 2017, the first press releases were sent out listing her as the director of communications and community relations for the Judiciary, replacing Andrew Laurence. Her LinkedIn page lists her official start date with the courts as May 2017.

Congratulations on your retirement, Jan, we’ll miss you but you’ve earned it.

-30-

“Hawaii Observer” has been digitized by UH Library and is publicly available online

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This is big news for those interested in modern Hawaii history or the history of Hawaii journalism.

The Hawaii Observer appeared on the scene in February 1973, and its final issue was dated just five years later in March 1978.

The University of Hawaii at Manoa Library has completed the project to digitize the Observer the result is now online.

From the new Hawaii Observer collection home page:

Hawaii Observer was a source of independent journalism published in Honolulu between January 1973 and March 1978. According to Helen Chapin in Shaping History (Honolulu: University of Hawai?i Press, 1996):

The alternative journal the Hawaii Observer (1973–1977) was among the more well known of the Islands’ periodicals and admired for its independence. Created and operated as a biweekly magazine by Tuck Newport, Hawaii Observer’s speciality was thoughtful analysis: for example, recaps of each session of the state legislature, and investigative pieces on such topics as land use, Japanese investment in Hawai?i, Waik?k? overbuilding, and the operations of the Bishop Estate. Its circulation reached 10,000. The young staff, mostly in their twenties, were nevertheless experienced journalists. Tuck Newport had put out an underground paper while at Punahou School, worked for the Advertiser, and was a press secretary to politicians Cecil Heftel and Daniel Inouye. “We asked questions that no one else was asking,” states former Observer writer Brian Sullam, like, “‘Who has the power? What makes the place tick?'”

Writers most heavily represented as authors of Hawaii Observer articles are Warren Iwasa, Brian Sullam, Tuck Newport, Steve Shrader, John White, and Byron Baker.

It’s fun and very informative to browse through the list of issues. Each issue can be downloaded as a pdf file. Although there is a search function, I couldn’t get it to work this morning while I was exploring the site.

But this collection has been a long time in the making and is represents a major resource for the public!

Bias toward coherence

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This is quoted wholesale from a friend’s Facebook post. The “bias toward coherence” is a brilliant term for what reporters who cover Donald Trump are facing.

Tom Nichols, conservative pundit and scholar, writing recently in the Atlantic:

“Donald Trump’s public events are a challenge for anyone who writes about him. His rallies and press conferences are rich sources of material, fountains of molten weirdness that blurp up stuff that would sink the career of any other politician. By the time they’re over, all of the attendees are covered in gloppy nonsense.

“And then, once everyone cleans up and shakes the debris off their phones and laptops, so much of what Trump said seems too bonkers to have come from a former president and the nominee of a major party that journalists are left trying to piece together a story as if Trump were a normal person. This is what The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, has described as the ‘bias toward coherence,’ and it leads to careful circumlocutions instead of stunned headlines.

****

“Reporters might listen to Trump and then understandably be reluctant to start typing stories that must feel like spec scripts for The West Wing pieced together by a creative-writing circle:

‘The former president, lying about abortion laws, said women murder their own babies in the delivery room. He megalomaniacally claimed that he gets bigger crowds than anyone in history, and compared himself to Martin Luther King Jr. He descended into fantasy by telling a story about surviving a helicopter emergency that never happened with a man who wasn’t there.’

“Instead, The New York Times ran this headline: ‘Trump Tries to Wrestle Back Attention at Mar-a-Lago News Conference.’ The Washington Post said: ‘Trump Holds Meandering News Conference, Where He Agrees to Debate Harris.’ The British paper The Independent got closer with: ‘Trump Holds Seemingly Pointless Press Conference Filled With False Claims,’ but CNN went with ‘Trump Attacks Harris and Walz During First News Conference Since Democratic Ticket Was Announced.’

“All of these headlines are technically true, but they miss the point: The Republican nominee, the man who could return to office and regain the sole authority to use American nuclear weapons, is a serial liar and can’t tell the difference between reality and fantasy.

“Donald Trump is not well. He is not stable. There’s something deeply wrong with him.”

Here is the original Tom Nichols piece in The Atlantic: “The Truth About Trump’s Press Conference/His obvious emotional instability is frightening, not funny.”