[ANALYSIS]
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For more than a year, the Star-Bulletin's editorial writers were afflicted with a peculiar strain of writer's block, an ailment first assumed to be terminal. During what we recognized to be borrowed time, we didn't need to be told that we could write our opinions about virtually every issue except the one evoking the most passion: the newspaper's very survival. Editorial voice quiet on dilemma
By Lee Catterall
lcatterall@starbulletin.com"Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one," A.J. Liebling is famous for saying.
The Star-Bulletin had relinquished its printing plant in 1962 when the paper was purchased by Gannett Corp., which went into a joint operating agreement with the Advertiser. That included sharing the Advertiser's printing press.
In 1993, Gannett bought the Advertiser -- including, of course, that elusive press -- and went into cahoots with Rupert Phillips to keep us going until the time was most profitable to shut us down. In the meantime, Phillips was our nominal, absentee owner who had the ultimate word on the Star-Bulletin's editorial stance. The only issue we were sure he cared about was the one we knew we didn't have the freedom to opine about, and about which we were polar opposites.
When a group of prominent citizens formed SOS -- Save Our Star-Bulletin -- we were unable to publish the editorial equivalent of a sports figure turning to the grandstands and pumping arms up and down to generate further support. When Gov. Cayetano authorized his attorney general, Earl Anzai, to file a lawsuit challenging the legality of our proposed shutdown, we remained silent on our editorial pages.
Not until November 2000, nearly 14 months after the announcement of our impending death and with the court approval of the Star-Bulletin's sale to Black Press Ltd., could we safely thank those who had come to our designated deathbed and applied legal resuscitation. We survive to this day because of those efforts. Our parent company, Oahu Publications Inc., which includes MidWeek, owns its own press -- our own press!
Strangely, some may think, many of those who insisted on keeping us alive had regarded us as their adversaries in years past. A key leader of SOS was Richard Port, former Democratic Party chairman. We had endorsed Linda Lingle for governor, yet Cayetano understood the importance of two daily newspapers in the community, both to readers and to advertisers.
During the Star-Bulletin-Advertiser partnership, advertising was consolidated in the two newspapers. After a monopoly of nearly 40 years, competition in newspaper advertising has returned to Honolulu. Rivalry existed between the two editorial staffs during those four decades, but not at the level known to occur between independent papers. Full-fledged independence tends to light fires under editorial staffers.
Eighty years ago, 500 cities in the United States were battlegrounds for competing, independent newspapers. With the growth of newspaper conglomerates and consolidation, full-fledged newspaper competition exists today in only a few American cities: Boston; Chicago; New York; Washington, D.C.; Trenton, N.J.; Wilkes-Barre, Pa.; Green Bay, Wis.; San Francisco; and Honolulu.
The most recent demise of such competition came in Denver, where a newspaper war that was fought for more than a century ended in a joint operating agreement between the Denver Post and the Denver Rocky Mountain News. The Denver truce was announced at about the same time as the Star-Bulletin and San Francisco Examiner returned to independence. Jerry W. Lewis, editor of the Boulder County (Colo.) Business Report, observed: "To become as profitable as it can, this new Denver Newspaper Agency is going to run a much leaner -- and higher-priced -- machine. Everyone knows it; they just don't want to say it yet."