Future researchers will almost certainly go first to "Shaping History"as the only availble comprehensive look at newspapers in Hawaii since missionaries printed the first one in 1834.
On the other hand it is good that the author is Helen Geracimos Chapin, who for eight years edited the annual Hawaii Journal of History.
It is also good that now there is at least one book telling about over 1,000 daily, weekly or monthly journals printed in a rainbow of languages, but with many short-lived.
"Shaping History," newly issued by the University of Hawaii Press, already has sold more than 500 copies of its first print run of 2,000.
Chapin marks May 9, 1976, as a major turning point. That's when the first same-day mainland TV newscast, Walter Cronkite's, was beamed to Hawaii. The first live sportscast had come 10 years earlier.
It has been downhill for the print media ever since, she argues, citing a 97 percent TV penetration of nearly 400,000 households statewide. She estimates newspaper penetration at less than 25 percent of households.
Hawaii Newspaper Agency figures show the Sunday Advertiser going into 65 per cent of Oahu households and the combined daily Oahu circulation of the Advertiser and Star-Bulletin at a few percentage points below that. although there is some overlap. The neighbor islands have dailies of their own. Multiple stations dilute the impact on any one TV voice.
Even Chapin sees a continuing need for print media and hopes for a strengthening in the future. Radio came off the ropes to new vitality. Can the print media?
The clue to an answer may lie in her classification of Hawaii's media since 1832 into four categories - establishment, opposition, official and independent. These categories fit less well today than in the past but suggest that there are multiple niches. The successful newspapers of the future will continue to find a need and fill it.
Most people today view the Advertiser and Star-Bulletin as establishment, yet we consider ourselves independent and beholden to no one but our readers and advertisers. The latter we serve best by bringing them the widest readership we can. Thus, readers come first, at least after profits, which are needed for any business to survive and remain independent.
Chapin is scholarly, careful and eager to present both sides when she deals with opposing viewpoints, of which the book details many dozens, maybe hundreds. Colorful encounters abound. Of those within my 50-year span of personal experience, she does quite a good job though even though we naturally see a few things differently.
SHE does as well as anybody in sizing up the long-running battle between Honolulu's two mainline dailies and former Mayor Frank Fasi. This gets a full chapter and gives current readers a taste of the even more heated, self-serving, biased battles of the past.
We also get a taste of past bitter Advertiser-Star-Bulletin rivalries, of the Star-Bulletin's lead in fighting for statehood, of past anti-labor stances of the dailies, of the left-leaning Honolulu Record appearing in the 1950s to "muckrake" into questionable practices the dailies ignored, and of independent newspaper voices (some Hawaiian) raised against the monarchy and the missionary establishment in the 19th century. Over 160 crowded years are highlighted in 44 chapters and 386 pages.
"Shaping History" offers insight into free press-free society interaction in Hawaii since 1834, as colorful and vigorous as could be found anywhere.