 ThinkTek Hawaii, civil engagement lives here. We are so happy here on a given Friday. Yes. This is ThinkTek Hawaii. I'm Jay Fidel and we're calling this Community Matters and that's Steve Petronic. He's the editor of Hawaii Business Magazine. We are thrilled and honored to have him here with us at this table. I'm thrilled and honored to be here. Thank you for raising me. You know, you have really done something remarkable with Hawaii Business. You know, first it was just a magazine. And now on top of a really good magazine, very relevant stories about our community, telling you things you didn't know, we appreciate that. And then you got into events for the business community and that was great, you're still doing them. I'm sure we should talk about them. But most recently, you know, the primo aggregator in this state and I read your stuff every day Steve. Hello there. Thank you Jay. It's really, really good. It educates me. Really beyond where any one single media might, you know, and Hawaii Business has become the king of news for me, honestly. Well, see the whole idea was we were not into breaking news. We're not into breaking news. But we thought all these organizations, they sent out a newsletter but it's all about their own stories. So what we do, every morning we go to about 12 sites in the state, news sites. We find the best stories there. We write a summary, a headline. We link back to the story in case you want to read the whole thing. And we send that up by email every morning at about 8.15 to get the top news stories in four or five minutes. You can read the whole thing in four minutes. So I mean, anybody could do that. You just have to do it very well. Thank you. You know, there's real magic in writing a good headline. There's real magic in writing a good lead in. And you can do that because you know the landscape, you know the context of it. So you can advance public knowledge by writing it up even in what 50 or 100 words to make it reach me. Yeah, not even that. It's probably, it's two sentences. So it's not even 30 words per summary. But thank you. We have great people doing that. Nancy Cook-Laur on the Big Island, she's writing the summaries for Jeff Howe here in Honolulu is doing the headlines and checking the links and everything. We have gotten amazingly good feedback. Let me tell you the numbers. We started with our initial list of 14,000 people. It's already doubled in less than a year. There should be 60,000, 70,000 people reading it every day because that's the kind of people who want that kind of information. We get all kinds of business leaders, nonprofit leaders, government people tell me this is a great service. Thank you for doing it. It makes my life so much easier. Yeah, it does. It's your morning, your morning lose is what it is. It's like the New York Times says something like that. Yeah, they did what we're reading and they often esoteric stuff. We go to the big site. We go to the Star Advertiser, Civil Beat, Hawaii News Now, all the neighbor island papers and a few of them, you know, white public radio and we give you the best of all of them. Yeah, but you do something else too. You order them. Yes. Because sometimes if I go to one, you know, what do you call it, more primary news source, the sources that you refer to? I may wonder why they ordered it in a certain way. When I go to Hawaii Business and the aggregation list, I don't wonder because I understand that you have actually put your brain cells on ordering them in a priority that's meaningful. This is really important to me. Well, it's called news judgment. It must be. And yeah, it's an acquired skill. We think about when news judgment is basically a story that's going to have the most impact on the most people. It's almost like a utilitarian philosophy. Most impact on the most people. But we also do it by island. So we've got the big statewide stories leading the newsletter and then there's Oahu stories and Maui stories, Big Island and Kauai stories. So if you're only interested in one of those, just zoom straight to Maui and you get all your local news. Something for everyone. Yeah. So and it was also a good way for us to get our stories out because there's a huge audience of people that don't read Hawaii Business Magazine, but we have great stuff. We have stories on sexual harassment, on immigration, on affordable housing, on the airports. Very timely. Yeah. And we want to reach people with those stories too. So mixed in with those breaking news stories are our stories. It's a win, win, win, win, win. I mean, I know why I win as a reader, but I think the news organizations that you're linking to, they win. They get readership by virtue of your efforts. Because there are people that won't be going to them otherwise. People don't have the time to go to all these websites every day. Right. Yeah. We tell them. You help the guy who wants it quick. And this is very bad. And once all of it. All the news that's fit to read really is what it is. Because you capture so much. The other thing is it's got to be helping the magazine. It's got to be helping your other activities like the meal events and the training events. So we make a little money off of it because we sell some advertising top, bottom, middle. We're telling people about our events so we can advertise the Wahine Forum or our leadership conference or the next Small Business Academy. All those things are advertised and so reaching all kinds of people. And we're a monthly magazine and yes, we have new content on our website every day. This comes out every weekday. So it's reaching people every day. So instead of one impression a month, you have 30 impressions. Exactly. 31 impressions. Well, weekdays only. Okay. So 22 maybe. So 20, whatever. Yeah. Okay. So yeah, I think that's important. And part of our job is not just to make money. It's to generate conversation in the community, to help people about the big issues. It's a public service. Yes, it is. So I think it does all. Yeah. All right. All right. Right here. Steve Petronic. I must give credit to Nancy, though. Nancy Cook-Lauer. She's the reporter that we can thank for learning the truth about Billy Canoy. She stayed on that story and tried to get those records for a long, long time until finally she got ahold of them. We found out who he's spelling. That's a great segue. That's something I would like to talk to you about. And that is the role of the press these days. We have the war on the press. We have all this fake news and confusion going on. We have the decline of the democratic ideals that we have grown up with in terms of the press and its role and its power, its influence. And now it's being attacked and being questioned at every turn. And so there are things happening. There are things happening where the only one who's doing anything about a given problem in our society is the press. And nothing will happen unless the press, until the press speaks. This is really important. And I see you as fully understanding that and advancing that notion. Press, for any change to happen, people need to know about the problems that exist and the possible solutions that exist. So a free press and a vigorous media is a necessary condition for change, for improvement, for democracy to flourish and even survive. Most important book in America today, the book you need to read, is Why Democracies Fail. It's written by two Harvard professors. One has an expertise in Latin America. The other I think is in modern European history. We've seen democracies fail. We've studied it. Mussolini, Hitler, Peron in Argentina, the fellow in Venezuela, his name escapes me right now. There's almost like a pattern to how these democracies failed. And some of those same things that happen in those countries are happening in America today. The attacks on the news media, the attacks on the independence of the judiciary, of the Justice Department and so on. Those things are happening. The demagoguery where even a powerful political party with a great tradition is starting to see some of, it's willing to give up some of the safeguards of democracy in order to maintain power and to spread its power. And there is a lot of those dictators in what we see and what Trump is doing. Yes. You know, Mussolini didn't get to be a dictator overnight. It was a pass. The same thing with Adolf Hitler, it was a pass. And what was interesting is that both Mussolini and Hitler used established politicians to get to power. And those established politicians thought they could use Mussolini. They thought they could use Hitler to help themselves, and instead those guys took over. And that's happened with the Republican Party. They thought they could use Trump, but he has taken over. Now they are all beholden to Trump. And he has the voter's ear and as a result now they have to cow-tow to him instead of use him. Same thing. They thought they could use him. In fact, he's using them. And he's on that pass. I got a book for you too called Democracy in Chains by Nancy McLean. And she is a reporter. She went to, you know, did investigative reporting on how some of these Republican races were funded to move the needle over to the extremist right. And it's not by accident. It happened with big money and it happened with a concerted effort to move the needle to the right. And that has happened. And those guys are really wrecking, in my opinion, wrecking our country. And it's part of that same phenomenon that you talk about, the decline of democracy in general. Right. And willingness to shade the rules a bit, whether it's the written rules, the constitutional rules, or whether it's the established morals and ethics that we have, you know, of bipartisanship, of things like that. And the authors of the book I mentioned, Why Democracies Failed, cite four different very egregious things that have been done, all unfortunately done by the Republican Party. One was not accepting, not even considering a Supreme Court nomination from the president. What happened in North Carolina, where it's basically coup d'etat when the governor, elected governor was a Democrat, the Republican legislature basically rewrote the rules to take away any power from the governor. And that coming on the heels of, of course, that infamous voting rights bill that was passed, which basically was explicitly created to prevent black people from voting, by restricting a number of advanced voting days and so on. And of course, that on top of gerrymandering to the nth degree, which is already existed in America, but got much, much worse. Three for all, and so many people in this country, either A, are willingly violating, you know, the founder's intention over the constitution, state and federal, and B, they don't know. They never got trained in it. They didn't study it in school. And so, you know, the press is an education. And sometimes it's the only education people get in their adult lives. And so, you know, you have a huge burden. I think you're meeting that burden, really. An important, important factor in the press for this state. No kidding, Steve. Well, I think a lot of it has to do with ownership. I've worked for a lot of different companies. Some of them were very bottom line driven, like the Gannett chain, which owned the Honolulu Advertiser for many years. And before that, the Star Bulletin. It, you know, our ownership is Dwayne Carrizo is a local boy, grew up on a plantation. It's all about giving back to the community that helped you. And so the magazine is about that philosophy of giving back. We're all in this together. How do we make it work? Whether it's affordable housing, whether it's creating jobs, good jobs for people. It's about supporting nonprofits and making government work efficiently and effectively. All those issues are things we cover in the magazine every month and we're finding a privilege to be able to report on that sort of stuff. Yeah, yeah. We can take a short break, Steve. And when we come back, we're going to talk to Steve Petraniak some more about what the important stories are and what they will be going forward. And you know, the role of the reporter in writing them up and selecting the material, writing it up and in having, maybe this is too strong a word, but a takeaway. A takeaway that he would like the public to think about and that he would like to make change. And how do you do that? How appropriate is it to try to do that in the press within the rules of the ethical rules of the society professional journalists of which you are a strong member? I know that. We'll be right back. Thank you. Hey, baby, that's you. I want to know, will you watch my show? I hope you do. It's on Tuesdays at one o'clock and it's out of the comfort zone and I'll be your host, RB Kelly. See you there. Aloha, I'm Richard Concepcion, the host of Hispanic Hawaii. You can watch my show every other Tuesday at 2 p.m. We will bring you entertainment, educational, and also we'll tell you what is happening right here within our community. Think Tech Hawaii, Aloha. Welcome to Sister Power. I'm your host, Sharon Thomas Yarbrough, where we motivate, educate, empower and inspire all women. We are live here every other Thursday at 4 p.m. and we welcome you to join us here at Sister Power. Aloha and thank you. We're back. We're live. We're back with an old friend, Steve Petronic, who is the editor of Hawaii Business Magazine who is doing great work in informing the public about important things. And we've been talking about the role of the press and how important it is, maybe more important now than it has been before in our lifetimes. And it has to be protected. It has to be cherished, actually. So one of the things is that if you look at media, especially outside the mainstream original news sources, like the New York Times, the Washington Post and so forth, sometimes they select raw meat stories. And I have an aversion to raw meat stories because I know that it doesn't mean anything. It's titillate me, maybe, or entertain me, but it is a thread, maybe that the news gatherers think I need to know about, but I don't. And you don't have that. You do have real solid stories in your aggregation and, for that matter, in the magazine. Well, one of the principles we go by is we cover stories that we don't see anybody else covering or we go after an angle that nobody's covering. So what we do is we take a national story. For instance, our cover story in the February issue, sexual harassment. And we took, obviously, a big national story and we localized it. Where is it happening now? What can companies and organizations do to prevent it or, first off, uncover if it's happening and then prevent it from happening in the future? Because, and very powerful cover. We even went to extent of, now we have a powerful cover with a man's hand reaching over a woman's shoulder. We made sure his wedding ring is on. And our designer, Janelle Kaleve Ching, did a different stock of paper for the cover which has a grittier feel. So you feel something's not right. Tactile. Tactile. So brilliant on that. But that sort of story, we're looking at immigration. Another national story, what does it mean for Hawaii? And of course, and a very positive angle on that, but we also have a second story. And I can't tell you about that because we are breaking news with that. Nobody else has done this story, but it's a negative angle on immigration. So we've got the positive, the negative. And because immigration is very complicated. It's not one issue. It's like a thousand issues mixed into one. There's economics, there's resentment, there's competition, there's catalyst. Yes. The startup economy, all those things are mixed up in it. And that's all under the... There has to be nuance. We have to, we can't just have a positive, negative, red, white, blue, green. No, you have to look at all the sides of it, really educate the public about this. And I think a lot of times, the press will take a position always the same, always beating up on this issue or enhancing that issue. You're absolutely right. I think there's always, not always, but many times there's nuance. The public should know the fine points as well. Right, right. So we did a story about the airports, and this is a few months back, but how that under government management, the airports are just falling into decay because you can't react quick enough to create a project. It takes years and years to build anything. What about an independent airport authority? I think that was a really good story. Where'd you come out on that? Well, it seemed to be the logical thing to do. It's like Roosevelt did in the Depression. If something's not working, try something else. It may not always work, but you can't keep doing the same things and repeating the same mistakes over and over and over again. What is the definition of insanity? You keep on doing the same thing with the expectation. Somehow it's going to change the result. So change things up, and it's a model that's worked elsewhere. So it's not like we're creating from whole cloth. It's being very successful in other places, so give it a shot. Government must take risks once in a while. All the officials cannot just protect their own employees. They've got to take risks, and sometimes they have to be prodded to take risks. Well, that's part of the job of the media. But to go to the airport authority question for a minute, it seems to me that one of the roles of the press, really especially distinguished from other places in Hawaii, is that we have this kind of consensus model. Nobody wants to take risks. Nobody wants to actually solve the problem. Everybody wanted to kick the can down the road for ever and ever. And it's the press, to me, and I think you agree, the press's obligation to point that out. We've got to come to an end of it. We can't just have those spinning round over and over again with no result. Put the study on the shelf, let it gather dust, have another study, and the result is no action, and the public suffers. No, no, absolutely. And when it's something works, we have to describe how it worked, and why, and suggest it as an alternative. For instance, we do a story on homelessness. Like I said, we don't cover what has already been covered. So what we did is we looked at three solutions that people have come up with. One was Dwayne Kurizu's Kahagi Ki Village over at Sad Island. So he's this client. It's an important project. It's an important project, and the first people moved in a few weeks ago. So we took a look at that, and how that collaboration happened, how it couldn't be replicated. Stuff that Sanford Carr is doing for affordable housing in Kakaako and elsewhere in Hawaii. And Savio, Peter Savio's efforts. He had a completely different model. His was more market-based type thing, but an idea of how to put more people into affordable homes and different approaches. So things that were working seem to be working, telling those stories. That's important for us. You know, in my observation, and I'm not the perfect guy to deal with this, but in my observation, more and more, the stories I see and like other stories that actually take a position on things. Including the New York Times, which I read, one of the reasons I read is because they do take a position on things. You get a clear feeling of what they want you to take away from that story. Even if it's strictly journalism. And I wonder if the SPJ's high professional journalist ethic on this is changing or maybe not so much center stream these days, because I think the press has an obligation to me now to actually express a view. Now you can say, well, just the facts, man, we're only going to report exactly what happened. But I think, you know, you missed the opportunity to give me some value. And I missed knowing what you really think. And it's not just an ob-ed thing or an editorial. I want to see in the interstices of what you write, how you feel. Is that wrong? So there's a lot of people that feel the way you feel. I, one of the greatest compliments I ever had was someone who worked with me for many years, 15 years, and the advertiser and the star bulletin, and she told me, I've worked with you all this time. I have no idea what your politics are. Now you've heard what I've just been saying earlier, but in my decisions in the newsroom, how I handled stories, and she was working 20 feet away from me and knew what a lot of those decisions were. She didn't know my politics. And I think I was very proud of that. Now, anybody who spends any time with me at a bar knows what my feelings are, but I try not to let them cloud how I tackle issues. And I want to see a lot of different voices in the media because one of the issues is we don't have all the answers. And we've got to throw the net broadly. We have to have a broad net rather than a single line when we write stories. One of the reasons Trump was elected is because a lot of the East Coast media wasn't in tune with what Middle America was thinking about. They didn't see it coming. They didn't see it coming. And because they weren't doing those stories, or when they did it, they weren't listening to the possible response. They were there, but they weren't hearing everything. And that's natural because their audience was East Coast based. So what you've got to do is try and be as many things as you can while being intelligent, while being resourceful about what you're, and covering things other people aren't covering. I mean, there's 1,000 people covering celebrity news and restaurants and so on. We stay away from those things. We're covering stuff that other people aren't. Yeah, I feel the same way. This is the most, that's the greatest contribution you can make to fill in the gaps, to find what the gaps are. What is our society? What is our public conversation missing? Right. I mean, sea changes that are really happening, not just made up, but sea changes that people ought to be thinking about and revealing that to them. Well, being as useful, we're business magazines, so one of the things we're, is trying things that are useful for businesses. How do you innovate? How do you recruit here in this economy? It starts coming up in the next couple months. About, we have a 2% unemployment rate in Hawaii. It's even less on Oahu. And one of the reasons these jobs go begging, it's because you're not paying enough for people to survive here. So you've got people with innovative solutions. Well, maybe they're providing housing, or maybe they're helping their employees to get the license, or the certification, or the training they need, so they can get that higher level job. They can provide more value to the company, and therefore the company can pay them more. So instead of just thinking inside the box, because it's not working, people can't afford to live here anymore. It can't be fast food and live. Even if you had three fast food jobs, that wouldn't do it. It wouldn't do it. And you're actually doing better for the community by getting the right person with the right skills in the right job. So you ever go on missions, like where you say, look, we want, and I don't know if this is a mission of yours, we want higher wages in this community. So we're gonna write a story now, and a story later. We're gonna pepper our network with stories about higher wages. For example, it becomes a kind of crusade, if you will, by one media about one issue. I know some media do that, do you do that? We do affordable housing as one that we've got over time and time again, whether it's like, how do you finance an affordable housing? What grants and state and federal funding is there? Tax breaks for your investors and so on. We've done that story. We've done the permitting thing. We've gone out for many times in what is the process? How can we make the process better, whether we've looked at it, how it's done somewhere else on the mainland, or what are the flaws in the current system we have at the county level? We've done, you know, the story I mentioned earlier about the different models of different people's models for creating affordable housing. Now that's when we tackled over and over again. And sometimes we've repeated ourselves over the years, but it's such an important topic. It is the most important issue here because it feeds into so much of our lives. Think of what happens if we ignore it. Think of the dark side. It's really awful in terms of speculating the result. So, you know, I wonder if, you know, this is very valuable. And to me, I think the great value is in the people who are the policymakers. You know, they should know about all the options that you're considering, all the possibilities you're ruminating about and revealing. Are they reading you? You get feedback from them? Do you get feedback either online or otherwise from the people who you would like to affect? I'm a lot more business leaders than politicians. I'm not sure. We distribute to all the politicians. We make sure they get copies especially and we really push special issues that we do when we do our quality of life report. But I know I'm reaching the business community. I'm doing, and a lot of that's very valuable because we have a very engaged business community here. The leaders of the locally owned organizations are very involved with the nonprofit community and with, you know, the community itself. So I think we're very privileged to have that here. I think one of the challenges is the mainland owned companies, you know, the Safeways, the Costco's, those companies aren't as engaged with the local community. Yes, they give occasionally and they trumpet that. But they don't have their leaders on the nonprofit board. They're not looking at local issues. No, the decisions are made somewhere else. So that's a huge impediment to change in Hawaii. The best news though is that the local business leaders are really engaged. The vast majority of them are engaged and they care about the community. Got to get them to run for office, Steve. Well, you know, the last one that did that was Walter Dodds. I asked that at a session where Walter was speaking after he wrote his book. I got up in line and I asked a question just like anybody else and said, Walter, why aren't business, you were a business leader, you were involved in politics. Very much, and to a degree partisan politics. And he gave a thoughtful answer. He said yes, but a lot of them are afraid of being identified with one party or another. And they're afraid they'll lose customers for that reason. And he said he never let his, part of saying he was a democratic, he was a very influential person in the Democratic Party in Hawaii, but he never let that influence his business decisions. And so he was able to do business with the Republicans and Democrats alike. Whether they are Republicans or Democrats, I think, yes, business leaders would be very valuable. They didn't have to get things done by definition. Absolutely. You know, we haven't covered, and I'm sorry we didn't have enough time, but we haven't covered a lot of the stories you have covered. And sometime, maybe in a series of times, I'd like to sit with you like this and discuss each one of those stories and what you've done, you're reporting on it, your conclusions on it, your suggestions on it. I hope you'll be available to just to do that again. Absolutely. So Steve, you're gonna stay with this, right? You're gonna retain the editor status. You're not gonna run for office, are you, Steve? No, no. I don't want to be clear about that. I thought about that maybe after a retire, but no, I don't know. You have to take too many stands that are unpopular if you're in the news business for any long time. Make too many enemies. I don't think that would be a wise choice for me. I wouldn't complain if you didn't. Steve Petronic, editor of White Business Magazine. Thanks, Steve. Thank you so much. Always a pleasure.