On the way to his first inaugural ball decades ago as mayor of Honolulu, Frank Fasi stopped by the makeshift office of the University of Hawaii at Manoa student radio station, KTUH, and gave student reporters there his first interview.
It was an evening of firsts: Fasi as mayor, KTUH as a licensed broadcast station and me as a political reporter.
Fasi, who feasted on controversy, immediately ripped into the state’s two daily newspapers, attacking the federally sanctioned joint operating agreement as an "illegal monopoly" and said his election proved Honolulu voters would not listen to the editors of the Star-Bulletin and the Advertiser.
What neither us would know as we started our different careers was how much cities and newspapers need each other.
The Monday news that Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos is buying The Washington Post is such big news because most of the time, newspapers are being crippled and shortchanged, not being endorsed and supported with new money.
The last decade has not been good for newspapers. During the Great Recession, newspaper employees, like many other workers, lost their jobs. While corporations are somewhat rebounding, newspapers are closing, trimming, laying off and shutting down.
Since 2008, more than 170 American newspapers have closed.
A 2009 Pew Research Center for People and the Press survey said 43 percent of those surveyed across the country thought it would hurt civic life a lot if their newspaper shut down. Of those who read newspapers regularly, the number climbed to 56 percent.
Not surprisingly, the younger respondents would miss the printed product the least.
What is not explored is what becomes of a city without newspapers.
Without reporters, the public is left, as former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said, with: "We don’t know what we don’t know."
Yes, the argument goes, there is the Internet, there are bloggers, and for intellectuals there is TV news (kidding about that last one).
Of course, bloggers and TV reporters aren’t going to sit through City Council meetings to find out if the Board of Water Supply has an even more circuitous way to raise your bills. What will happen instead is that the city will write its own blog and city workers will tell you what happened — and don’t bet on it being consumer friendly.
At the state Legislature, the budget committee won’t cancel its meetings because the newspaper that used to send reporters to meetings isn’t around anymore. Ways and Means will still meet and issue a reassuring report at the end of the session saying everything is going great.
One of the truisms of government is that it is in a constant debate with itself about deciding precisely how much truth it wants to tell and when it will tell it. Without the reporters asking how much the trip to Zurich cost, don’t count on the House clerk to volunteer the information.
News consumers relish the investigative journalism that good papers produce, but everyone needs the steak-and-potatoes reporting that keeps track of how much money school libraries get, where the governor is and whether the city has bought any new garbage trucks in the last decade.
If Bezos can take his interest in journalism and the purchase of The Washington Post and marry it with his patient dedication to technology, it could be a new model for public information.
Budget-priced Amazon Kindle tablets filled with subscriptions to The Washington Post.
The news you can use is the news we cannot afford to lose.
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Richard Borreca writes on politics on Sundays, Tuesdays and Fridays. Reach him at rborreca@staradvertiser.com.
