Here are two stories from the last century.
It was Oct. 12, 1973. Two days earlier Vice President Spiro Agnew, Richard Nixon’s two-term vice president, resigned after being charged with accepting more than $100,000 in bribes as Baltimore County executive, governor of Maryland, and vice president. That afternoon, Nixon was to announce a new vice president.
As a then fresh-faced Honolulu Star-Bulletin political reporter, I was sent to the airport to meet then-Hawaii U.S. Sen. Hiram Fong — listening on the radio while driving to learn who Nixon picked — and ask our only GOP senator what he thought.
Meanwhile, Chuck Frankel, the news editor, had grabbed a transistor radio and wheeled his typewriter into the composing room to sit next to the linotype operator. Linotype machines are a clanking, whirring, hissing, now-extinct printing machine that take molten metal poured into one side and spits out neat columns of lead type on the other. Back in 1973, there was not a computer in sight.
I found Fong, got the interview, put a dime in the pay phone to call my editor with details and drove back to the Kapiolani Boulevard newsroom.
The Star-Bulletin Green Streak final edition was on the street; newsboys were holding up the paper announcing “President Picks Ford to Be Vice President.”
In a little more than an hour, the Star-Bulletin had its 15-cent-a-copy of our daily history out for readers. And I was thinking what a fast, exciting and important way to make a living. I wanted to do it forever.
The other story comes from either 1969 or 1970. I’m sitting in an afternoon journalism class at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Bonnie Wiley, already famous as the Associated Press’ only woman combat correspondent in the Pacific during World War II, was teaching. Not only was Wiley a journalism legend covering battles on Iwo Jima and Okinawa, but if you were her student, you also were her friend.
Her question to the class that day was simple: “Why are there newspapers?”
We all knew the answer. Newspapers speak truth to power. Newspapers protect the public’s right to know. I think I even quoted the phrase carved into stone on the tower at the University of Texas: “Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall set ye free.”
Newspapers, we said, give the public a voice; newspapers are the public eyes and ears reporting on government, representing the public.
Another student found the old Chicago newspaper quote: “The job of the newspaper is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.”
All good answers, Wiley said, but wrong. “Newspapers are a business. It is their job to make money — don’t forget that.”
Today’s debate about how information on the internet wants to be free is distinct from Wiley’s dictum that papers are a business.
Free stuff on the internet is different from the product of dispassionate, professional journalists writing a daily chronicle on the important things that happened in your neighbor- hood, city and country.
Newspapers pay reporters to sit in those City Council meetings, attend those legislative hearings and learn about tax policy, land use and labor laws. If the reporters are not there, the City Council and the school board will still meet, but you won’t know about it.
Like other papers, the Honolulu Star-Advertiser is a business and it is changing and evolving. Part of that evolution is that I’m going from writing three columns a week, to writing one every Sunday — call it semi-retired.
Those conversations with readers, voters and even those politicians have always been the best part of work — and I’m looking forward to it continuing.
Richard Borreca will write on politics on Sundays. Reach him at 808OnPolitics@gmail.com.
