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Now the story can begin to be told. Two full days away. Without a computer. No email. No web. No telephone. No cats. Were the Linds at the swank Kona Village resort for a brief bout of forced relaxation? Actually, no. Our escape was to that well-known local landmark, the Maui Beach, located on the shores of beautiful Kahului harbor. Tucked next door to the defunct Maui Palms and the Maui Seaside. No hordes of tourists offloading at this place. A Robert's Overnighter. Economy level.
No computer? That was on purpose, although I almost broke in the 30-minutes before we left Kaaawa, and there were cold sweats the first morning I awoke without running out to the keyboard. No phone? That was the hotel. Use of the phone would be extra charge. We passed.
More about our view from the underside of Maui tourism tomorrow.
7-11 store in Kahului
Access to the Star-Bulletin has definitely improved. Bulletins were on display at the airport when we arrived midday Wednesday, and were readily available at various stores, including 7-11's, several supermarkets, etc. We didn't see a S-B for sale at the Maui Beach, or next door at the Seaside, but they seemed readily available in a timely manner. That's a huge change. If distribution is going as well on the other islands, it has to be making a difference after decades of limited availability.
Here's a folo to the "missed stories" item that started the week.
Reports of the ongoing federal antitrust probe of the Hawaii Medical Service Association, discussed here on Sunday, have failed to note a similar investigation back in 1994-95. At that time, the Department of Justice interviewed a number of people in Hawaii, and ended up dropping the investigation less than 6 months later after finding no absence of competition in the local health care system.
Click here to read the final recommendation
I also had a brief item in Honolulu Weekly this past week prompted by another story missed by the mainstream."Edgar Lum, the Palolo man killed last month by a former tenant who had just been evicted, has been described in news reports as an apartment manager, a landlord, and an independent real estate investor."Lum was actually a slumlord in a state where the word is rarely heard."
I didn't take the time for a more complete story because I assumed the daily reporters would make the obvious links sooner rather than later. Turns out that I could have taken my time. In any case, you can click here for the full text of this brief item.
July 26 & 27, 2001 - Thursday and Friday - No entry today.
I'm taking a break and won't be updating this page until Saturday afternoon or Sunday morning. Don't worry, nothing serious. Just a chance to sleep in for a few days before the summer is over. So you can stop by and browse the photo gallery and other goodies, but don't expect any new entries until the weekend. Descriptions of withdrawal symptoms gladly accepted, of course.I received widely divergent responses to yesterday's observations on the conditions in the sales departments of both the Advertiser and Star-Bulletin. A view from the Gannett side:
"You described the situation perfectly!!! I am so glad you don't forget us and only write about the writers. And I would say it's an evil, calculated, manipulative empire vs. the amazingly incompetent managers at the Star-Bull who do not know how to manage a daily newspaper and it's daily adverti$ing chores."Another person described a recent incident at the Star-Bulletin/MidWeek:
A few weeks ago, the sales management held a staff meeting and admonished ex-HNA staffers for having a "bad attitude." Yes, right in front of the assembled sales staff.One ex-HNA staffer immediately quit, just stopped showing up for work. Others have packed their parachutes.
But from another S-B staffer:
With respect to everyone, I do not agree that there are a lot of unhappy campers in the Star-Bulletin/Midweek organization.There are bound to be some. One of the things that humans beings do best is disagree with each other. Partners, parents and children, siblings, cousins or coworkers. People have agendas, and are unhappy if theirs isn't the alpha agenda.
Nevertheless, my honest feeling is that there is minimal dissent at Star-Bulletin/Midweek, and that whatever dissent may exist is superficial.
I have never been, and never will be, an apologist. I am not being an apologist now.
But in all honesty, what I perceive most at Star-Bulletin/Midweek are the desire and the will to succeed. And gratitude for the opportunity to do so.
And then some serious questions from another reader.
My friend just received a flyer from a sales person at the Star Bulletin that said reach 100,000 on the weekdays & 130,000 on Sundays. I just don't see how this can be true. I've got a buddy that works on the floor and he said it takes them four hours to print the paper during the week. I think I read in two articles where that type of press can only print 15,000 an hour max.With my math that comes out to 60,000 not 100,000, and I bet they don't sell every paper they print
This prompted a quick reply within an hour or so:
I'm just a reader with no inside poop either, but I think when a paper says they "reach 100,000" they mean the number of readers, not the number of papers printed. If the S-B prints 60,000 on weekdays, that means they're claiming about 1.4 readers per paper...pretty conservative if you ask me.
And, finally, something completely different from former S-B editor Chuck Frankel, one of the central characters in Dave Shapiro's reminiscence that started the week:
"Two people were kind enough to send me Dave Shapiro's account of newsroom bickering between Ed Edwards and me."I don't recall that particular incident, but it sounds true.
"But it is not true that Edwards and Frankel "couldn't stand each other." We were then friends and remain so, despite differences in opinion."
So it goes. I'll be back online in a few days.
Here's an interesting thing. Every time Gannett managers over at the Advertiser scold staffers and warn against any contact with me, it has the opposite effect. I invariably get several emails, sometimes anonymous, and several new readers. There must be people having a good laugh every time this happens.But unhappy staff are by no means limited to Gannett. There are also a lot of unhappy campers in the Star-Bulletin's 5th floor offices at Restaurant Row, where the administration, sales and marketing folks are all located. Unlike the S-B newsroom, which is covered by a Newspaper Guild contract, none of the folks upstairs are protected by a union.
"They are top heavy with managers who have no experience running daily papers," says one source. 'That is why the ad dept. is doing so poorly. Former MidWeek people are having a hard time adjusting to the former Advertiser people (who jumped ship and moved over from HNA), and the Canadians are just nuts."
I'm told that even former Advertiser employees who moved over because they believed in the Star-Bulletin are now having a difficult time under the Canadian management. Like Rodney Dangerfield, they don't get no respect, or not what they feel is deserved.
An alert friend caught this sign on a McCully businesses following the cat-attack hysteria last week.
"Felineous assaults."
All but one of our pack of felineous assaulters are out and about at 5:10 AM. This is an interesting trend. During periods when we are around the house more during the day, they evolve away from nocturnal playing and manage to stay awake all day, sleep all night. But we've been in town most days, and they're reverting to the natural pattern.
The photo gallery was updated yesterday, joining Silverman's gallery update from the day before.
Star-Bulletin writer Burl Burlingame added another layer to the Gannett library controversy, alleging that the S-B's former photo server in the old newsroom had been hacked into by Gannett techs (see the 7/18 entry in his Honolulu News Blues):Not only are old-fashioned paper photographs, microfiche, clippings and microfilm involved, but the Star-Bulletin's electronic photo archives have been looted as well. Likely, this means that Gannett copied these materials from the Star-Bulletin's server prior to change-over, which means the theft was premeditated. This might also explain several mysterious outages with our electronic photo database in the weeks just before the switch, while the system was maintained by Gannett techs.It looks like there are lots of loose ends remaining to be explored.
Our current mystery at home is this: Where are Harry and Lizzie hiding out? They're spending a lot of time somewhere in the yard or nearby. We didn't see either of them on Sunday between about 8 a.m. and 5 p.m. They don't appear to be any worse for wear, although Lizzie hasn't reached the level of plumpness common among our other cats.
Speaking of plumpness, her highness, Ms. Wally, weighed in during yesterday's annual health checkup at a substantial 14 pounds, 2 ounces. Kili was a more modest 12-1/2 pounds.
Ms. Lizzie
A few more recent pics of Mr. Silverman are now available--just click on his banner at the top of the page.And on a sad note, I got a message yesterday that Burl's dog, Kawika, died over the weekend. " He just curled up in the sun yesterday (Saturday) morning and let his heart stop."
The Sunday Advertiser led this morning with a good story by Frank Cho describing a federal antitrust probe of the Hawaii Medical Service Association, by far the state's largest health insurer. It's a good story, but it was already done by Peter Wagner, who reported on the antitrust investigation in his Island Business magazine months ago. Peter sat next to me at the Star-Bulletin before he left last year to take over as editor at the magazine, and he did a pretty thorough job on the HMSA story. I'm not sure whether the Advertiser actually advanced the story at all from Peter's earlier reporting, but such is the news food chain.And here's a wonderful newsroom vignette from the annals of Star-Bulletin history from former S-B managing editor Dave Shapiro, prompted by an exchange during here during the week of June 23:
I was poking around your site before writing this to see what you've been up to and was delighted by that thing you had with those old farts Chuck Frankel and Ed Edwards still going at it after all these years. When I started at the Star-Bulletin in the late 1960s, Edwards was city editor in charge of local news and Frankel was news editor in charge of wire news and producing the paper. They were both fine editors, but total opposites. Edwards was reserved and conservative, Frankel was loud and liberal. They couldn't stand each other. Edwards was scornful when Frankel was given a promotion to assistant managing editor. When managing editor Hobe Duncan was promoted to executive editor and no replacement managing editor was named, Edwards took to calling Frankel the "assistant nonexistent."Edwards once assigned me to do a story on the impact of automobiles and traffic on Oahu. I did a long-ass esoteric piece that told you everything there was to know about cars in Hawaii -- how far toward the moon they would stretch, how much pollution they belched out, how much they cost. It needed a whole page for just the type with no art. It filled more than 20 of those fat snap-out "books" with three carbons that we used to write on.
Edwards hated it and refused to run it unless I rewrote it a lot shorter. But one day Frankel had a page to fill and saw my story sitting in the copy tray. It was a thick stack of paper and hard to miss. He read it, loved it and made plans to run it. Edwards got wind of this and confronted Frankel. They got into a tug-of-war in the middle of the newsroom over physical possession of my story. As they wrestled to pull it away from each other, the paper clip that held the fat wad of pages together fell off and the carbons went flying all over the newsroom. Frankel won out and the story ran the next day, but I was never sure if they got the pages back together in the right order (nor was I sure that it mattered). I loved those guys.
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