BY any other name, zztype@aloha.com is Blaine Fergerstrom, AKA webmaster@starbulletin.com. In case you haven’t noticed, starbulletin.com is Hawaii’s leading online newspaper and now, according to a reader poll conducted by the American Journalism Review, one of the nation’s Top 20. It’s also Fergerstrom’s baby. The man behind starbulletin.com
When Blaine joined our staff last March, starbulletin.com didn’t even have a name. It was just an idea we had to extend the reach of the Star-Bulletin beyond Honolulu to people who couldn’t get the paper and to communicate better with all our readers.
That idea brought Fergerstrom, whose background is actually in advertising, to work in our newsroom. He had the communications, design and computer skills to make our Internet edition a reality. He also has an incredible amount of energy. Watching him use his Macintosh to turn newspaper stories and pictures into today’s online edition is a little like watching Jerry Lee Lewis at the piano.
Last summer, I interviewed a job candidate interested in working on our online edition. She’d interned for a summer at a large East Coast online newspaper and had done her homework. After she read me a list of ideas to improve starbulletin.com, I told her they sounded great, but how would we be able to do all that with an online staff of one?
“One?” she said. “You’re doing all that with
one person?” She hadn’t met Blaine.
