Viewers of "KITV4 Morning News" will see a new member of the team Jan. 28 as Mike Cherry joins Ann Sterling, Lara Yamada, Cam Tran and Lei U‘i Kaholokula on the broadcast.
"He’s a great guy who has paid his dues and earned the opportunity to join the best morning team in town," said KITV President and General Manager Andrew Jackson in a statement.
Cherry left Hawaii News Now on Jan. 2 after 14 years that began at KGMB-TV, as indicated in colleague Stephen Tsai’s Warrior Beat blog.
Unlike his previously sports-focused time, Cherry will serve as a news anchor and reporter at KITV.
He also will be working at the opposite end of the day, getting to the station in the darkness of the wee hours and leaving during daylight, versus the other way around, which had been his entire broadcast career.
Cherry is a Maui High School graduate and native of Haiku, Maui.
While Cherry was still sad about the Oregon Ducks’ loss to Ohio’s Buckeyes on Monday, he said that looking forward, "I feel like I’ll be able to enjoy watching sports again … without having to take notes, or worry about having to do the painful Q&A after losses."
Another difference in his career path will be that he won’t be shooting or editing his own video.
"I’ve never stopped shooting (video)" and "I’ve always edited video," Cherry said. "This will be the first time since 2001 or 2002 that I’m not going to be required to shoot anything."
His earliest days at KGMB-TV were spent as an unpaid intern, but he was later hired as a video editor and then transitioned to a position as a videographer "for a little over four years," during which he shot news and sports footage and won awards for his work, including a regional Emmy Award.
When sports anchor Steve Uyehara was bumped up to the debut of the "Sunrise" morning show on Hawaii News Now in 2007, Cherry was picked to fill the sports anchor slot, and from there the sports director position followed.
As someone who felt the isolation of growing up in a small town on a neighbor island, "if somebody on TV would even mention Haiku, I remember how jazzed up we would get" at the acknowledgement, he said. Even a small mention of his hometown made him feel like part of the fabric of Hawaii, and now, "to know that I’ll be able to deliver those kinds of stories is very attractive."
Hashtag gamble for HVCB
Whether the hashtag becomes a "bashtag," social media users will decide.
Creating a so-called hashtag, or the # symbol followed by a word or phrase to promote something via social media, can be a great way to boost your brand or a certain topic.
That’s why the Hawaii Visitors and Convention Bureau has launched an effort to invite isle visitors and residents to share photos of favorite vacation memories with the hashtag #LetHawaiiHappen.
Everybody knows the Hawaiian Islands are beautiful, but sometimes even more compelling "are those special memories that couples, families and friends create throughout their stay as they hang loose and go with the flow," said Jay Talwar, HVCB’s chief marketing officer, in a statement.
The #LetHawaiiHappen hashtag will "amplify their stories and photos" so others who search the sites using the hashtag also can see what others are posting.
HVCB will use some people’s content across its marketing channels to highlight the only-in-Hawaii experiences people have shared.
Your columnist may well be accused of inviting disaster here, but these hashtag promotions can go horribly wrong, and have on many occasions.
Exercising their right to free speech, many social media users have turned hashtags their creators intended to be uplifting into what are called "bashtags," which mock, disparage or vilify the entity that created the hashtag.
To try to improve its image, the New York Police Department launched an effort using #myNYPD that was turned against it by social media users who posted pictures of New York’s finest in unflattering or, in some cases, possibly actionable behaviors.
Among many other examples, similar unintended consequences befell McDonald’s #McDStories and Starbucks’ #SpreadTheCheer campaigns.
"That’s the new world," Talwar told TheBuzz. People’s ability to "get divergent points of view" as opposed to slick, prepackaged, company-issued statements "is one of the benefits of social media," he said.
Nevertheless, HVCB research going back generations and up through today shows that "the most influential source" of travel recommendations is family and friends. Right behind that, currently, is the Internet.
Of the people who travel to Hawaii from North America, 99 percent would recommend a Hawaii vacation to their family or friends, he said, so there is little worry on the part of HVCB or its affiliates that #LetHawaiiHappen will get leveraged into something negative.
"What we see is, if we get the current flowing in a positive direction, that flow tends to carry the conversation in that direction," he said.
Aware that hashtags can get hijacked, HVCB officials and marketing partners have monitored social media sites for #LetHawaiiHappen since its soft launch in the fourth quarter of last year, and constantly monitor references to the islands as a matter of course.
They have discussed what to do should the conversation turn negative, but on their side are countless former visitors and current residents who, officials have found, will step in on their own "to change the flow … into a positive direction," Talwar said.
———
Reach Erika Engle at 529-4303, erika@staradvertiser.com or on Twitter as @erikaengle.
