This all was begun 128 years ago by James W. Robertson, in charge of the royal household of Queen Liliuokalani. The son of British settlers of Hawaii bought a daily bulletin of arrivals and departures of ships and mails, passenger lists and other items of local interest from editor and book merchant Henry M. Whitney.

Robertson printed the first single-page issue of the daily bulletin on Feb. 1, 1882, expanding it nearly three months later to the four-page Evening Bulletin, Hawaii's first daily newspaper.

The Hawaiian Star was introduced by businessman J. Ballard Atherton in March 1893. Wallace R. Farrington became editor of the Evening Bulletin in 1898 and merged it with the Star in 1912, and we have been the Star-Bulletin since then.

Tomorrow, “;Bulletin”; will be dropped as part of this newspaper's name, replaced by “;Advertiser,”; the descendent of the weekly Pacific Commercial Advertiser, founded in 1856 as a weekly by Whitney, the son of missionaries.

For more than a century, the Star-Bulletin has chronicled Hawaii's history, and in some cases, became an integral thread in the societal tapestry. We were the first paper in America to report on the 1941 Pearl Harbor attack, the only Hawaii paper doing so on the day it happened. The paper also strongly opposed martial law from its inception shortly after the attack.

Beginning with the 1934 visit of Franklin D. Roosevelt, which prompted a 118-page special edition, we have kept Hawaii's citizenry connected at each presidential visit. Richard Nixon, John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and native son Barack Obama were extensively covered at each island stay. The Star-Bulletin was the nation's first newspaper to endorse Obama in the historic 2008 general election.

Joseph Farrington, who succeeded his father as president of the Star-Bulletin and was chosen as a delegate to Congress from 1942 until his death in 1954, led to make the Star-Bulletin a strong proponent of statehood. When a senator from Mississippi alleged that Hawaii was dominated by Communists, the paper devoted most of its first three pages to the names of Hawaii's dead, wounded, missing and prisoners in the Korean War.

When statehood came in 1959, the Star-Bulletin's photo of Chester Kahapea hawking statehood editions two days before his 13th birthday was published on the front pages of newspapers across the country, including The New York Times.

Farrington's wife, Elizabeth, took the newspaper's helm and resigned in opposition to the Star-Bulletin's sale to Chinn Ho, who left his position as a director of the Advertiser, which faced financial doom and was saved by an agreement of the two newspapers to share advertising, circulation and printing costs.

The joint operating agreement continued after Gannett Corp. bought the Star-Bulletin in 1971. Gannett sold the Star-Bulletin to a straw man in 1993 so it could purchase the Advertiser.

Despite underlying uncertainty over its future, it was during this period that the Star-Bulletin's publication of the “;Broken Trust”; essay by five prominent citizens in 1997 revealed mismanagement of the Kamehameha Schools/Bishop Estate. The piece led to a state investigation resulting in the removal of the estate's trustees and a revamping of its policies.

In 1999, Gannett moved to shut down the Star-Bulletin, but a federal judge ordered the paper to be put up for sale. Canadian newspaper publisher David Black bought the paper for $10,000 and has kept the Star-Bulletin alive, gradually turning it into a morning paper even while incurring sizable and continuing financial losses.

The Internet has been a devastating blow to the newspaper industry in recent years, resulting in two-newspaper cities becoming a rarity. Honolulu's newspaper rivalry has become a luxury that the city no longer can afford. An important era thus comes to an end with today's final, separate editions of the Star-Bulletin and The Honolulu Advertiser.