Star-Advertiser

Aloha, Star-Advertiser.

E komo mai to the new newspaper born out of the purchase and closing of The Honolulu Advertiser by the Honolulu Star-Bulletin last week.

And welcome to the scrutiny that loyal readers give their daily newspaper.

Do I understand correctly that The Star-Advertiser has devoted almost the entire front page and half an inside page of its first Sunday edition to an extra $300 weekly inspection cost for fresh produce coming to Hawaii?

Fresh costs

Hawaii consumers are paying more for fresh produce because of state cutbacks

That was $300?

Let's see if we can do the math: $300 times 52 weeks equals a total of $15,600 per year. Presumably these include the "thousands of dollars in extra costs" mentioned in the first paragraph of your story.

And what does that mean when, as your story says, "that bill is passed on to everyday Hawaii shoppers."

Hmmm. Hawaii was bringing in 269 million pounds of fresh produce a year as early as 2004.

$15,600 divided by 269,000,000 pounds of produce works out to.....

Holy cantaloupes Batman! That's a whopping .005799 cents per pound--call it .0058 cents. That's roughly like you take a penny and cut it into 10,000 pieces, and take 58 of those pieces and add them to the cost of a pound of pears.

I know, .0058 here, .0058 there, pretty soon you're talking about real money.

This is unconscionable. As importer Mark Teruya said in your story, "we can't have the food chain get disrupted for the consumers of Hawaii."

Finally, we understand why food costs in Hawaii are so high.

The USDA says it costs $218.90 to feed a family of four in Hawaii on a thrifty food plan, compared to the U. S. average of $135.30 for the same food.

And now you say we have to add .0058 cents for every pound of imported produce we buy.

This situation developed, you report, because the number of state inspectors recently has been reduced from 58 to 40 because of budget cuts.

And, according to the state official whose budget has been cut so drastically, Domingo Cravalho, the inspectors are anxious to come back to work.

But hold on a minute. The average base salary for each inspector, you say, is $35 an hour. More math: $35 an hour times 40 hours times 18 inspectors works out to a savings of $25,200 per week in state budget costs.

If Hawaii has to choose between paying an extra $300 a week for all its fresh produce inspections on the one hand, and paying another 18 inspectors a total of $25,200 per week, I'll take the tax savings.

It appears The Star-Advertiser has been taken for a ride with two groups behind the wheel--the produce importers, and the state inspectors.

There are alternatives.

Two years ago, University of Hawaii researcher PingSung Leung and State Agriculture scholar Matthew Loke suggested reducing

the $3.1 billion Hawaii consumers send to mainland and foreign agribusinesses every year. Just a ten percent shift from imported to locally-grown products, they said, would equal more than $300 million a year in economic activity in Hawaii, with $94 million going to farmers and generating $188 million in sales, $47 million in earnings, $6 million in state tax revenues, and more than 2,300 new jobs.

Dead Man Walking---or "Somebody Forgot to Tell the Computers"

The regular on-line email from The Honolulu Advertiser arrived on schedule this morning, one offering the weather, the other the "latest news."

But the only content was the date: June 7, 2010.

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Monday, June 7, 2010 ADVERTISEMENT This e-mail was sent to: wrightw001@hawaii.rr.com This e-mail was sent by: The Honolulu Advertiser, 605 Kapiolani Blvd., Honolulu, HI 96813, USA You may decline to receive further electronic mail from The Honolulu Advertiser. To request not to receive future electronic mail you may unsubscribe to this mailing or change account preferences using our account management form (requires log-in). Replying to this message with 'Unsubscribe' in the subject line will deactivate your online account and cease delivery of editorial and electronic mail from The Honolulu Advertiser within a maximum of 10 business days. Changing account preferences using the account management form may cease further electronic mail faster and gives you more control over what kind of email you want or don't want to receive. Use of this service indicates your agreement to the Terms of Service (updated March 2009) Unsubscribe to commercial electronic mail | Change account preferences | Terms of Service

(Oh, and there was an advertisement for "super-fast 4G technology" of the kind that has been killing off competing daily newspapers all across the country for years. My other alma mater, The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, succumbed March 17, 2009, and survives only in on-line form.)

The rest is history.

The Honolulu Advertiser died in its sleep last night. It would have been 154 years old on July 2.

That's the date in 1856 that a missionary's son named Henry M. Whitney pulled the first edition of the weekly Pacific Commercial Advertiser off a hand press in a little wooden building on Merchant Street.

Whitney was also the father of the other newspaper that has died here overnight--the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, which has bought out The Advertiser for a reported $125 million. The new nameplate appears this morning, the first edition of the new Honolulu Star-Advertiser.

It appears that Whitney was likely Honolulu's first blogger. (Sounds unpleasant, doesn't it--and you probably would have gotten punched if you called a man a "blogger" in 1856 in the dusty little town of Honolulu.)

Whitney had a book store where every day he posted a "bulletin" of the latest news and talk of the town.

So perhaps there is still hope. Stick around 154 years and see.

Follow me, where I go...to the beach

With the demise of both the Honolulu Advertiser and the Honolulu Star-Bulletin newspapers today, in favor of a new hybrid called The Honolulu Star-Advertiser, I decided to resurrect my old website, The Honolulu Reporter (thehonolulureporter.com) to create another little alternative to the new monopoly in print journalism in Honolulu. And I am renewing my acquaintance with my little-used blog, "Walter Wright's." Please come to Walter Wright's for daily or more or less observations and news of life in Hawaii, from The Old Man on the Beach.

Aloha,

Walter Wright

Click: delete. A newspaper dies....

I have just finished reading through the Advertiser's final edition and was sitting down to write a note to some of you, when I noticed the daily email digest of the weather from the 'Tiser and their top stories as well.

I started to click on "delete," and stopped. One little click, and it will be gone, cold-type hot-type victim of a digital dismissal. That's the way the world goes, or at least this part of it, these days.

It used to be there was nothing so old as yesterday's newspaper. Now there is nothing so old as last minute's on-line update.

It was a nice final edition, almost devoid of smug self-pity, generous in defeat, some really nice writing from so many of our former colleagues.

After reading "and others too numerous to mention" about ten times, my perusal of the farewell stories became a sad and vain (yes, both meanings) search for my name in the lists of the veterans and survivors.

Tom Kaser made it. I didn't. Is that my journalistic epitaph?

Ah, well. John Strobel et al gave me an excellent front page mock-up when I retired a few years back, and Bob Krauss gave me a full column send-off. It doesn't get any better in Hawaii journalism than to have been Krauss-ified.

And I'm in good company. Most of you didn't make it either.

And, unlike 400 other now former Advertiser employees today, I have a livelihood--or a facsimile of one that is still fooling some folks in the midst of the colllapse of the economy. Real estate was a great place to have your nest egg in 2005, but not so much today, when the yolk's on me.

And I didn't make it down to the building last night to say goodbye, so that tells a story, too. I was busy buying an iPad, and having a dinner at our place for three of my wife Jane's eight brothers and sisters.

I had only gone back to the building two or three times since leaving the paper, which suggests to me that something was superficial--me.

It will always be one of those if-only-I had memories.. Too late now, baby, it's too late.

I realized at mid-day yesterday that I hadn't carried out a task I had always planned, and actually arranged for in writing when I left the paper--going back to the morgue to retrieve the hard copies in my byline file, and diligently copy thousands of other stories I had written over 27 years.

I had thought I might someday write an autobiography--"The Haole of the Narcissus" is a title that comes to mind, with apologies to Joseph Conrad.

But maybe not. Sitting at dinner last night with Jane's family and some other friends, I asked one of them if he had any idea who his great, great, great grandfather was, and he said no. That's the reality for most of us, Ancestry.com to the contrary notwithstanding.

That ancestor, like mine more than a few generations back, has disappeared into a shadowy oblivion, as most of us will some day, having made whatever small scratch on memory we have made.

Islands in the stream, that is what I mean.

Or the glint of one or two of a million shards of sunlight bounced back from the ripples on the river flowing past Siddhartha Gautama when he sits on the shore and--enlightened--perceives our lives in true perspective.

The two people I was most pleased to see celebrated in the Advetiser's farewell edition were GC (you know, the guy whose last name was "Must"), and Thurston Twigg-Smith.

Reading the history of the paper made clear how influential George Chaplin and Twigg were in saving the newspaper, over and over and over again, until time and maybe talent and a shift from plantation day reading habits finally saw the Advertiser triumphant.

(And how the mighty are fallen.)

The history also made clear their were other giants--some of them with pygmy hearts--in the roll call of the Monarch of the Pacific dailies. And all for what?

For the joy of it, the fun of it, the good of it, the dollars, the little impacts on destiny.

When I first came to the paper in 1976, it was sitting pretty in the joint operating agreement with the Star-Bulletin. Managing Editor Mike Middlesworth said it was a money machine--we would get our share no matter what. "We don't HAVE to put out a good newspaper," he said. "We do it because we want to."

Like a beau geste, the seemingly pointless act that will make no difference in one's survival except for the quality of the moment, and the memories.

And we did it because GC wanted to, Buck Buchwach wanted to, Twigg wanted to. We all tried so hard to live up to the privilege of putting our gloss on the reality of the passing days. "THIS is the way it happened!" each story said, some more accurately than others.

Well, time to get on with the day. Did that OTHER paper arrive yet? It's -30- for the Star-Bulletin today too, you know.

Today--journalism in its finest hell-bent-for-leather scrapping fighting tradition. Tomorrow--The Honolulu Star-Advertiser.

The King is dead. Long live the King. For many years to come, I hope, and for the sake of us all.

Click: delete.



Aloha,

Walt

Uh-oh

Penultimate line in The Honolulu Star-Bulletin's last editorial today:

"Honolulu's newspaper rivalry has become a luxury that the city no longer can afford."

The Star-Bulletin will be merged tomorrow, Monday, with the late lamented Honolulu Advertiser, as Honolulu loses daily newspaper competition since both these papers started about 150 years ago, when Hawaii was still a sovereign nation ruled by a monarchy.

The new paper will be called the Honolulu Star-Advertiser.

But If this self-serving statement is the sort of editorial opinion we can expect from the new Star-Advertiser, we are in a lot more trouble than we thought.

Forget the weeping and wailing by fired employes and social critics and journalism professors.

Take a listen to what advertisers are saying about Honolulu's new print monopoly.

Oh--you didn't see any newspaper stories about that?

That's odd.





Walter Wright

Hi, folks--here's some musings on the impending death of The Honolulu Advertiser, where I worked for almost 30 years before retiring in 2003. The last edition was published today, and the paper will be merged with The Honolulu Star-Bulletin, under the name Honolulu Star-Advertiser.

I just awoke from a dream in which I had gone to the paper this morning to say goodbye, found myself sitting at a desk, and an editor, Vicki Ong, had come over and said "the Wallace Foundation is in town again, and since you've done such a great job covering them before, I'd like you to handle this story." This wasn't a goodbye celebration--it was vintage Vicki Ong trying to sweet talk a cranky reporter into doing a "must" story. Another editor, Marsha McFadden came by later to give me some paperwork on the foundation. I put it in a folder and then couldn't find it.

Wade was walking around being busy, and then I left the building with someone, a guy, going out to lunch, maybe, and Sandee Oshiro was there with us, and there was some talk of a running event coming up the next day, and the guy and I were going to do it. I had my arm around Sandee's shoulder as we walked out of the building and I asked her if she was going to run, and she said, "I'd really like to, but I'm not feeling well,"

I gave her a big hug (I know she'll cringe if she ever reads this), and held her, remembering her challenges with cancer and thinking about my own daughter and her cancer battle, and wondering if I should tell Sandee about my daughter, deciding not to. I held her and, with my voice cracking, said, "I haven't treated you as well as I should have." ((Sandee was the first person I worked with at the Advertiser when I arrived from Seattle in 1976. My first assignment, from Mike Middlesworth, was to look into Polynesian Cultural Center's tax situation, and Sandee had been assigned to help this hot-shot investigative reporter from the Coast with some of the research. Many, many years later, Sandee and I had a fabulously notorious run in when she flamed me for making an inter-office text message crack about the photographers coming back from an assignment on kim chee and bearing many dishes back to the newsroom. They invited the staff to sample some as they had, and I had sent a note saying "...and four of the photographers won't be there because they have been hospitalized at Queens after eating kim chee." Sandee was furious and accused me of making a racially insensitive remark, and demanded to know if I had any idea how many people I had offended.))

I left the building, and then I was with Middlesworth, and somehow we got into a place that sold little fantastic rubbery animal toys that talked when you squeezed them. I got fascinated with trying to buy as many as I could--not the broken ones, I remember--and when I looked up Middlesworth had gone on and I couldn't find him, thought about calling him, realized I had left my cell phone in the car. Then I was walking mauka on a much improved River Street with many shops and restaurants like the River Walk in San Antonio, and I saw coming toward me a much older version of Carlino Giampolo, white haired and heavy set. Carlino had been a charming publicity seeker who tried to promote his self-help relationship book through the paper, and once ran a full page ad railing against the new industrial looking street lights installed along Kalakaua Avenue in Waikiki years ago.

He came up to me and we talked, and I said "I retired about five years ago, and I don't get into town much any more."

And that was about it, and I woke up with this rich, sad, sweet feeling about the passing of a great newspaper, the memories of so many great people, the things I had done and some I wished I hadn't done, the cameraderie of a staff that partied together and ran marathons together and joked together and sometimes fought together.

I had been thinking about the paper all the time in recent days, not doing or saying much, and the dream just came to me and did a lot of it for me.

So long, Advertiser, and Advertiser staffers. We shared lives and loves and births and deaths (some of them our own), visiting emperors and rampaging elephants, Marcos in exile and swindler Ron Rewald, hurricanes and tsunamis and pseudo-namis, for almost 30 years, and now it is gone. But you will always be there in my memories, and in my dreams.

Aloha,

Walt

On Jun 5, 2010, at 4:43 AM, Tom Kaser wrote:

OUR ISLAND

Star-Bulletin

By Rob Shikina

Advertiser staff packs up on last regular workday

It is a sad day for journalists as the paper's final edition comes out tomorrow

Jun 05, 2010

Ann Miller worked her last day yesterday at the only full-time job she's ever had, which had lasted 30 years.

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Deputy Director of Photography David Yamada gave a lei to staff photographer Deborah Booker yesterday as Gregory Yamamoto looked on.

"It was just surreal," said Miller, who was at a small gathering of employees from The Honolulu Advertiser last night. "It was hard to be there."

"To think that you're not going to see those people again was very, very difficult," said sports reporter Miller, who will be working at the Honolulu Star-Advertiser.

The Advertiser finished its last regular workday yesterday after nearly 154 years.

Assistant Editor Marsha McFadden said about 20 employees will work today on the Advertiser's last edition, but some staff members are planning to drop by to finish packing or witness the "end run."

Tomorrow the historic News Building at 605 Kapiolani Blvd. will be empty, McFadden said.

"Everybody, I think, remains pretty speechless," said McFadden, who will join the Honolulu Star-Advertiser as city desk editor. "It's a very sad day."

With the merger of the Advertiser with the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, about 450 employees are losing their jobs with 356 of them coming from the Advertiser, said Honolulu Star-Bulletin Editor Frank Bridgewater.

The Star-Advertiser will have 475 employees -- more than the 300 at the Star-Bulletin and fewer than the 580 at the Advertiser.

Norman Shapiro, an Advertiser photographer for 18 years, said the mood at the paper yesterday was "better than it has been the last few days."

"If anything, it's like a relief," he said.

He was one of eight photographers not offered a spot on the new staff and said it will be difficult finding full-time work as a photographer in Honolulu. He plans to file for unemployment on Monday.

"There's no work in this town," he said, but added he plans to relax.

"I think everybody's happy it's over finally," he said. "It's been dragging out for so long. We can move on."

Holly Amuro, of retail advertising, said former employees came by the office yesterday to say goodbye, and employees had a potluck lunch.

"We kind of had our last hurrah," she said, adding she was hired for the new paper. The new employees will report to the Star-Advertiser at Restaurant Row on Monday.

Miller, volleyball reporter for the Advertiser, said she "was blessed" to be able do to her job for 30 years.

On Monday she will be one of 30 newsroom staff hired from the Advertiser.

She considered the closure of the Advertiser a "huge loss" for the community and worried for her friends who were not offered a spot in the new venture.

"Sixteen of my closest friends are not working on Monday," she said. "It makes me so sad."