County Purchase of Maui News Property: Another Nail in the Island’s Media Coffin?

The Maui County Council is considering a proposal to buy the Maui News’ complex of buildings in Wailuku for $9.8 million and it’s generating some heat. The notion of such a purchase during the fiscally throttling pandemic has some Council members and the public questioning its practicality. In fact, a special meeting will be held for public input this Wednesday at 5:30 p.m..

Proponents say that the three-building Mahalani Street complex near Maui Memorial Hospital would be a perfect location for county offices. Plus, it’s a way to turn a small portion of the $3.6 million the county shells out in annual lease fees into a mortgage payment instead. The skeptics? Well, they have a lot of questions about the purchase, as indicated in a Feb. 10 letter to Mayor Michael Victorino.

A proposed resolution introduced earlier this month in the Council’s Budget, Finance and Economic Development Committee states “that the Council finds the acquisition of the Properties to be in the public interest.”

Is it? Purchase arguments aside, there’s a larger public interest issue at play here. It’s one that the community has seen unfolding over the past few years. I’m referring to the continuing degradation of the Maui News by Ogden Newspapers, Inc., which purchased the paper in 2000. The Wheeling, West Virginia-based company was founded in 1890 by H.C. Ogden and continues to be run by his descendants, the Nutting family. In addition to 40 small newspapers around the country, company patriarch and CEO Bob Nutting also owns the Pittsburgh Pirates and several resorts.

On the company’s website, Nutting writes: “We are proud of the support our newspapers are able to provide to their communities and local businesses. We constantly strive to preserve the best of our newspaper’s century old traditions while adapting to the modern innovations that will help carry them into the future.”

I’m not sure whether Maui News staffers would concur with Nutting’s assessment. So caring is Ogden that employees learned of the property’s possible sale not from management, but from a County Council agenda item. However, rumors of a lease or sale had circulated through the newsroom for several years.

Under the proposed sales agreement, Maui News employees will be relocated from their newsroom. They (and the printing press) would move into a much smaller space in a back building on the property. After a two-year grace period, the paper would then pay $10,000 per month in rent to the County if it remained in that location, according to the proposed agreement. How’s that confinement going to work in today’s pandemic-mandated, socially-distanced climate? Who knows? I guess the good news is that reporters won’t have to walk very far to interview county officials, although I doubt the staff sees it that way.

The sale itself isn’t unusual. Like many other news organizations that also sold their flagship buildings, Ogden was hurting even before Covid struck. Companywide, Ogden has shed employees, merged operations, and pursued other cost-cutting measures.

As those actions have intensified, I’ve heard plenty of complaints about working conditions at the Maui News. They echo criticisms about Ogden expressed on national employee feedback websites such as Glassdoor.com.

“Outdated computer software, and sometimes cuts corners on technology upgrades in order to keep profit margins,” wrote one contributor about Ogden. “No corporate digital strategy,” said another, adding, “Inept owners who demean employees and their own unqualified publishers to newspaper staffs… Don’t tell dedicated employees who work 60+ hour weeks that they’re not ‘up for the job.’”

Another former employee wrote, “Get your computer hardware and software up to speed. Following way behind the industry. Invest in your current properties and people. They are the ones making you the money to purchase additional properties, ski resorts and a professional baseball team.”

 The Big Squeeze

In other cities, ailing newspapers have developed robust, versatile online sites as a way to attract and keep subscribers. Or they’ve become non-profit operations. In extreme cases, where absentee owners were particularly heinous, civic leaders stepped up to return papers to local ownership. My former employers, the Los Angeles Times and the Minneapolis Star Tribune, both emerged from near-terminal conditions after their acquisitions by local businessmen.

Here on Maui, however, it looks like Ogden’s intent is to squeeze every last dime out of its investment and leave an emaciated skeleton in its wake. I’ll lay you odds that the parent company won’t spend one dime of its $9.8 million sale proceeds to help resuscitate the Maui News, which is gasping.

The paper has shrunk to the size of a supermodel and now publishes only six days a week. Its website is a static joke, updated just once a day at 7 a.m.. Staff has been decimated by layoffs, buyouts, and early retirements. Employee numbers have eroded significantly, from a one-time high of about 120 employees to the current staff of about 39. Right now, there are only six reporters covering local news. Then there’s photographer Matt Thayer, who now seems to write as many stories as he shoots.

The copy editors are largely gone. You can tell that from the goofy errors that are popping up on a regular basis. A recent story about the Bank of Hawaii carried the headline, “Band of Hawaii Reports Earnings for 4^th Quarter.” In another issue, the paper’s day of publication was missing from the front page. There was even a suggestion that the paper’s copyediting be outsourced to the mainland.  Good luck with those Hawaiian spellings and ‘okina.

Managing editor Lee Imada was a pretty stalwart presence against the Ogden overlords during his 40 years at the paper, but he’s gone now. His departure last year wasn’t into retirement, but to a job as Executive Administrative Assistant with the nonprofit Maui Economic Opportunity, Inc.. His replacement, Colleen Uechi, is in her 20s. Through no fault of her own, she simply lacks the years of experience necessary to do battle with corporate bean counters and other purveyors of bad ideas.

In addition to its reduced news-gathering ability, the paper also has lost much of its local personality. During the tenure of publisher Joe Bradley, who retired last year, the Maui News ran community-focused editorials. It took stands on issues, political candidates, and other matters of importance to Maui County residents. Two publishers later, the paper’s daily opinion page editorials are 95% reprinted from other newspapers, further underlining management’s reluctance to voice a local viewpoint about, well, anything.

Wire stories are rampant. Important local news stories are being missed or ignored. But I won’t armchair quarterback those decisions—not when the team is playing hurt. I fault management for cutting its staff beyond a reasonable, functional level and then standing by while the operation bleeds out.

An Island News Desert?

Journalism on Maui is in serious peril.

MauiTime stopped publishing a weekly paper edition last year as a result of the pandemic and is currently a digital, editor-less shell of its former self. Owner/Publisher Tommy Russo poured his heart, soul, and finances into that publication for decades. I can say for certain that if MauiTime owned a building to sell, Russo would use the proceeds to make sure the newspaper and its staff thrived. He exemplifies how important it is to have media owners who live among us.

Then there’s the online operation Maui Now, owned by Pacific Media, which many point to as the logical successor to the Maui News. Its website is superb. The downside: it’s full of press releases and soft features. When there are hard questions to ask local officials, you can be sure they won’t be coming from this organization. It recently advertised for a reporter. The rate: $15-$20 an hour, about the same as a barista. But they get tips, too.

In this growing news desert, the current administration has flourished. Mayor Michael Victorino has made it clear that he has no tolerance for real journalism. He prefers to issue aggrandizing press releases to Maui Now, give softball interviews to friendly radio personalities, and run news conferences with hand-picked questions. That former Maui News city editor and reporter-turned-county spokesman Brian Perry presides over this mockery of government “transparency” is unforgiveable.

Am I being objective here? Absolutely not. As a career journalist, I’m passionate about responsible, professional news gathering and dissemination. Do I have a dog in this fight? Yeah, the news dog. None of us do this for the money. Print journalists can be a querulous, cantankerous bunch. But they are trained professionals who, in most cases, respond well to bosses who understand the peculiarities of the occupation.

Do the island’s current news purveyors have those skills? From what I hear, no. I have repeatedly contacted newly-promoted Maui News publisher Chris Minford (formerly the paper’s circulation manager) to ask, in general, where he sees Maui journalism heading. Crickets. I tried the same with Maui Now editor Wendy Osher, who referred me to Pacific Media CEO Jack Dugan. He emailed that he was too busy to talk to me.

News or Noise?

Communities cannot function properly without healthy news organizations. That’s the thesis of Washington Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan’s sobering 2020 book, Ghosting the News: Local Journalism and the Crisis of American Democracy. In it, she writes, “The newspaper ties a region together, helps it make sense of itself … serves as a village square whose boundaries transcend Facebook’s filter bubble.”

For those of you who think those sentiments are too emotional and squishy, try this. Sullivan cites a study that showed that a lack of local reporting can actually raise taxes, since, without media oversight, borrowing and spending by governments rise. She adds that, in the absence of local media watchdogs, “politics will become even more polarized; government and business corruption will flourish; the glue that holds communities together will weaken.”

Maui’s social media, the Coconut Wireless, and small websites (like mine) won’t keep our island appropriately informed. The two-person Maui 24/7 Facebook page is a marvel of reporting about accidents, weather and other breaking news, but you won’t find analysis of County budget discussions. I love Akaku community television for its fantastic streaming of local government meetings, but without the kind of reporters we have at the Maui News, who are trained to analyze and contextualize the information imparted, a lot’s going to get lost in the process.

Whether the County buys the Maui News property or not (and I hope they don’t; let that blood be on someone else’s hands), our island leaders need to take a hard look at the accelerating erosion of news-based information on Maui. We need to decide who we want to be as a community: enlightened and engaged citizens, or a bunch of ill-informed, overtaxed idiots.