 Welcome to Community Matters on Think Tech Hawaii. I'm your host Kendra Austin and for today's show we are discussing citizen journalism. What is it? Why is it important? And how has it opened the doors for platforms such as this one? If you want to ask a question or make a comment, you can tweet us at thinktechhi or call us at 374-2014. And here to bring their advice to this topic is Executive Vice President, Chief Operations Officer and Director of Think Tech Hawaii, Kara Mali. Hello, Kara. Welcome to the show. Hi, Kendra. It's nice to be your guest today. Thank you. So, how is a position like yours relevant to this topic of citizen journalism? All right. Thank you for asking. Well, as you mentioned, my title here is Executive Vice President, Chief Operating Officer of Think Tech. And it's a volunteer position, but Think Tech Hawaii has been around since 2000. It started by Jay Fidel doing on public radio. And in the last several years we've been on, we have a YouTube, we broadcast on a live stream platform and on video. And therefore our platform has expanded. And so what we do is we provide interviews, shows that cover a variety of topics. And our mission, Think Tech's mission is to promote public awareness and create a platform for civic engagement. And to do that, we employ and we use our hosts or guest hosts who do not get paid. And they act as citizen journalists going out into the community and bringing in content topics of interest to inform, to educate, to let our community know what's going on. So I, as Executive Vice President, along with Jay Fidel as President, and our board of directors volunteered to help run Think Tech. We have a wonderful staff. We have interns like you who help us produce 35 hours a week of content. So why is it important to use this regular citizens? Why not professional journalists? Because we don't have any money. We're a nonprofit. So we are a nonprofit, which means we do not collect money. We do not charge for our services. So what we do is we ask different organizations, grants, underwriters, donors to help support us. People like myself and Jay volunteer our time. As I said, our hosts volunteer their time. Our guests volunteer their time. We do pay for our staff and pay for our rent. But we don't have that extra money that network television shows have because they're profit-making. They sell ads all the time. They're selling sponsorships and they're selling opportunities for other people to make money. So we don't do that. Since we don't do that, we rely on guests and our hosts to volunteer their time. But we think it's a wonderful platform because our hosts, we have 35 to 40 shows a week on a variety of topics. And each one of our hosts is interested in and perhaps an expert in their field. And so they bring to our platform shows of so many different varieties and subject matters that otherwise may not have an opportunity to be presented to the public. So would you say the authenticity of your, the journalists that come, does that separate you from other platforms? Yeah. Well, you know, I personally don't call myself really a journalist, a hardcore journalist because I've never been trained in journalism, you know. And I don't think our hosts have been either, most of them. But what has always been the case, they've always been citizen journalists because if you have an audience, if you have had a witness to a disaster, you have an audience, a witness and that witness might tell other people about it. Well, that's reporting, right, what went on. What we have these days in this particular period of time is the added value of technology. And so, and I like to think of photography. So in the past, we all had little cameras, you know, we had little cameras and we take pictures and we could become photographers. But we were not professional photographers, we're amateur photographers. But once we take a picture, there's no venue, there's no place to disseminate that picture, right? I might show it to you or my family or print it out, but that's it. And the same with a witness to an event, a witness, a volcano eruption. What am I going to do with that? Well today, I can use my camera on my phone. I can now disseminate that on YouTube, on Facebook. I can bring it to a platform like ThinkTech and we can put it on our own live stream and have a much bigger audience, global audience. Not just local, not just statewide or national, but a global audience. So that's been the major change in the last several years with the growth of citizen journalism. Now probably some people think citizen journalism is combined with a certain amount of responsibility, public civic-mindedness and responsibility. And that too, ThinkTech feels that that's an important part of what we do as citizens journalists that we have value to the community by presenting and providing information that's not otherwise available. So that's what you would say makes ThinkTech stand out amongst other citizen journalism platforms? Well, in Hawaii, sure, everybody who has a phone can post it on YouTube, right? And there you have it, but how are you going to access it? What we have is we actually have ThinkTechHawaii.com, a very popular widespread website and YouTube pages. I think that's the right word, pages. And we also do podcasts. We live stream, which means on our website we are at this moment, you and I are live stream. Later on, our show will be uploaded and will then be available to the world by accessing the URL. And we are able to promote it so that if anybody checked the keywords, right, citizens and journalists, they're going to find our show. This is a new, much bigger way of providing that information to the public that, you know, years ago was not available. So I did read that citizen journalism platforms are more like alternative media. So do you think this can maybe become mainstream media, citizen journalism? Oh, I don't know that it wants to be mainstream, I think, you know, because we're never going to be, citizen journalism as we as ThinkTech use it, we're never going to hire newscasters. We're never going to hire people to go out and research or follow a story. It's because our nonprofit status defines how we do business. So I think we provide certainly an alternative form of media, but I think it just opens the perspectives to people so that there may be a TV station or radio station you listen to that's going to give you one perspective that's maybe the news is gathered by somebody who's researched it, but an observer like a member of the audience might see it in a different way and might see things or hear things or report on things in a way that's different than a paid professional broadcaster. So I think that's really valuable that wasn't available in the past because there was no platform to get that information out. So it just creates a bigger picture. So I don't think it replaces mainstream media, it's an important facet in the overall knowledge that people can use to make a decision. Let's say on voting on a particular, we have our primary coming up on Saturday, right? And you've been very involved in researching some of our candidates. So I think it's a really important contribution that ThinkTech has to our community that we can provide interviews with different candidates here beyond what they might see on network news or in the newspapers. So what has this, what is the impact of this type of journalism on the islands? How has ThinkTech impacted the islands with its different information? Sure. Well, because we've been able to, because we're fast, you know, we can do it on a daily basis on an hourly basis if we have to. We have cameras that go out into the communities subject to our having staff to go out there and do it. And we can bring something and we can put it on the air right away. We don't have editing issues. We don't have production cost issues. So we can bring things immediately to the community. What we also can do, and we've done this, we wish we could do it more as we go to the neighbor islands and cover different topics that maybe the broadcast network stations don't have the funds to do on a regular basis. So we've been able to do that. We can go out to different events. We just went to HPU, just opened an e-sports arena. We went out there. We can cover science fairs with students and interview the students. We can cover events at, you know, all sorts of places all over the islands that smaller events that maybe don't quite get the same attention that broadcast stations are going to have because they have to spend the money to send a crew out there. We don't have that problem, so we can cover more variety of different events and topics and issues. And so you say you can immediately obtain information by sending a crew out. So has there been any negative side effects to that or are there even pros and cons to always being readily available to information? Well, you know, I kind of exaggerate a little bit. We're not always readily, because we have a staffing issue too, right? But no, I think it's to the benefit of our community that there is an alternative to the standard newspaper, television, radio means of distributing news that we are an alternate. And what we have really proud of is our hosts. And we have hosts who are politicians, who are doctors, lawyers, who are farmers, who are scientists, who are engineers, who are veterans, who are style and social media savvy people, who are, you know, such a wide variety of people. We have students like you, you're going to be a senior at UH West O'ahu, right? So I think that that opportunity to give you a voice and to give you an opportunity to talk to the people whom you're interested in is something that you wouldn't get on the mainstream news media because they don't have the space or the time yet to let someone like you, who has not yet, you know, not on their payroll, to somehow do a 30-minute show. And you say, Think Tech is a nonprofit and none of the hosts are getting paid. So how do you persuade these people to, you know, take time out their lives and come in, spread information? You know, you'd be surprised. Jay Fidel is the greatest ambassador for Think Tech, right? If anybody knows Jay, Jay is the founder of Think Tech, the creative genius. He's a retired lawyer, but he's more than that. And he's a scientist, and he's a techie, and he's a historian, and he's a sociologist, and he is just so curious. And I always say that a really good host is really curious, and he's really curious. But he has this personality too that draws in people, and people love to talk with him, whether they're being interviewed or not. And he, people volunteer pretty rarely to be hosts because they understand and appreciate the platform that we can give them. So that this is an opportunity, for instance, for, we have a farmer's show, and they come in and they bring in different people to talk about different, either events or developments in agriculture or all sorts of things that they may not otherwise have. And so no, we don't, we also have a new set of programs that we're doing in different languages. So right now we have a Japanese show, and I think we have one in Korean. Maybe you know more. But you know, we're trying to expand the types of shows we have. We have one of our most popular shows is a new show with Rusty Komori, who is a tennis coach. He was a very famous award-winning tennis coach. Yeah. For 22 years, I think he had 22 consecutive national titles for his team, unheard of in any sport. But he comes on our shows, and he has a wonderful network of people, and he brings them on. He brought in Chris Lee from the Academy of Media, and the way he's brought on the governor. You know, he just has a wide variety of contacts. And we have many hosts like that who bring in people who are involved in their particular interests and engage in conversation and inform our public. So we'll have to take a quick break right now, but hold on, we'll be back with more community matters with Kendra Austin. My name is Stephanie Mock, and I'm one of three hosts of Think Tech Hawaii's Hawaii Food and Farmer series. Our other hosts are Matt Johnson and Pomei Weigert. And we talk to those who are in the fields and behind the scenes of our local food system. We talk to farmers, chefs, restaurateurs, and more to learn more about what goes into sustainable agriculture here in Hawaii. We are on on Thursdays at 4 p.m., and we hope we'll see you next time. And Aloha. My name is Calvin Griffin, host of Hawaii Uniform. And every Friday at 11 o'clock here on Think Tech Hawaii, we bring in the latest in what's happening within the military community. And we also invite all of your response to things that's happening here. For those of you who haven't seen the program before, again, we invite your participation. We're here to give information, not disinformation. And we always enjoy response from the public. But join us here, Hawaii Uniform, Fridays, 11 a.m. here on Think Tech Hawaii. Aloha. Aloha, and welcome back to Think Tech Hawaii. I'm your host Kendra Austin. And today we're discussing Think Tech Hawaii and Citizen Journalism. And here to discuss it with me is Kara Mali. Hi. Hi. So when we left off, we were talking about Think Tech and its impact of Hawaii and how do you persuade hosts to host the various shows on here? So how do you persuade people to support Think Tech as well? Right. Well, as I said, we're a nonprofit. Okay. So which means, and in our case, as a nonprofit, we have to do several things. Most, for the longest period of time, we rely solely on underwriters, corporate underwriters. So Jay and our directors would go out into the community. And we have a core group of corporate underwriters who every year donate funds to us, probably between $5,000 and $10,000. And for that, they are acknowledged on our brochures, on our shows, whenever we can. And of course, we thank them personally for underwriting our shows. And typically they're in industries like Castle and Cook. Anyways, I don't want to name them all because I'm sure I'm going to miss somebody and I'll feel really bad about that. But we have wonderful corporate underwriters in every year, as I said. And sometimes some take a break and can't help us for a year. We also now apply for grants, community grants. So we have applied for Hawaii Community Foundation grants, Castle Cook Foundation, Atherton Foundation, Sydney Stern. And we've been, you know, it's not as predictable in some grants we get. Sometimes we don't get grants. We've applied for a government state called GIA, Grant and Aid. Unfortunately, we haven't received any of those. So we do our best with grants, with underwriters. Of course, we always solicit individual donors, small donations. So on our website, we have a page, a link to a donation, become a friend of ThinkTech. And you know, we love a $25 donation or $50 donation, you know. We would gladly accept it. It helps us. In addition to that, we've tried so many other different things. So for instance, last year, we started a campaign with something called CauseVox. And it's an online campaign where we solicit donations and people can see using our online website where our donations, our donations are going. And we have little promo videos. Last year, we raised about $27,000. And this year, we're going to do a campaign in October. So this is the big announcement. We're going to do a CauseVox campaign this October. So please help us donate money to our CauseVox campaign. We also participated in the recent Oahu Visitor Charity Walk. So we had a little team from ThinkTech and we had some of our directors and family friends join us. And we walked. And we hope to raise money from that. So we, individual donations, corporate donations through underwriters, grants, events, charity walks, CauseVox, we also have looked into actually soliciting ads like for sponsorships. But that hasn't been as successful. So although we would love to be able to provide that service, that hasn't been as successful. So it's tough. Every year, we're, Jay and I are always out there shaking the bushes, as they say. So how do you go about asking these people to help fund ThinkTech? Like, what do you say to get them excited about this platform? Yeah. Well, the first thing I always say is give them the link to our website and show them what we're doing. Because our content is really what should tell people that we are important and valuable contributor to our community. That without ThinkTech, this opportunity, this venue for citizen journalism would not be here. Our hosts and our shows would not have another platform to go to. So we pay for this beautiful studio in downtown Honolulu. Our cameras, our wonderful staff. So this gives an opportunity for content, a certain type of content to get out into the community. So we tell our underwriters and our donors and our grant makers, please, we serve this community in a way that no one else does. Please support us. And we give them information, our list of our shows, the list of our hosts. We cover, as I said, the range, politics, farming, agriculture, so many different things. And invite them to the studio. We love to interview our underwriters or our donors. We give them an opportunity to tell us about their business or their work or whatever event they're promoting. And typically, at least with our underwriters who have been so generous through the years, that has been something they've valued. Are there any regular underwriters who are hosts or guests here? Well, we don't. And let's see, underwriters who are hosts. Yes, we will. For instance, the University of Hawaii, we have definitely some shows from different departments. I think, oh boy, I'm drawing a blank. We definitely have a lot of shows on energy because we get supported by some different groups within the energy sector of our community. We also have hosts who are directors. That's also a nice cross-pollination. We have a lot of our directors who come on as guests. And so, yeah, we try to mix it all up because we want to give everybody an opportunity to understand what we do here. And one way to do it is by actually being on camera and seeing that this is a great opportunity to talk about whatever is of value or interest to them. So are any of these underwriters, they're all from the islands or either from the mainland? Most of them are from the islands. I think we have one or two who, an individual, for instance, Gail and Hope, I think lives on the mainland. But most of our underwriters are corporate underwriters who live or are from here in Hawaii. So what I urge everybody to do is to look at the end of the show. And I believe there's a list of all of our underwriters right there. Oh, wow. I'll go to our website, right? Oh, yeah. TechHawaii.com. So I know it's mainly, this platform mainly discusses a lot of Hawaiian issues. Are there any, well, also like politics as well. So is there a lot of attraction from the mainland to this platform or is it mainly just Hawaiian? Oh, no. We consider ourselves global international because, as you know, we have Think Tech Asia. We have a lot of shows relating to Asia because of our location in the Pacific. So whether it's law issues or environmental issues or international political issues, yeah. No, we focus on international, national, local, statewide, neighbor islands. So no, we want to cover all sorts of issues. Of course, right now, and you're very involved in this because of our primary on Saturday, we've been very involved in our local primaries. So we've been focusing on meeting as many of our local candidates and providing them an opportunity to talk about their issues and also giving the public an opportunity to see, to learn more about them. So what do you see for the future of Think Tech? Well, more and carrying on to continue an opportunity, this opportunity for the public to be informed, to have their, to promote our, you know, as I always say, our mission is to raise public awareness and promote civic engagement. So we want to raise public awareness by our content, right? So the more you know, the more we can inform you about, the more information you have to make different decisions, better decisions, more informed decisions, right? And therefore our citizens, our electorate, will have more complete background to do and act on things that will help promote and will improve our community, right? We want to have better educated. We want to have a better elevate the dialogue in our community so that we're all on the same page as far as whether it's policy issues on environment, education, you know, energy, economy, right? I always think of the ease. So that's what we want to do is just to continue to do what we've been doing and have more people watch us and we, as I said, we have a good YouTube presence and we're on Facebook and Twitter and podcasts and of course our website. So do you think Think Tech will have a lasting impression on this community from years to come? I hope so. It has so far, you know, as I mentioned in the beginning, Jay Fidel started Think Tech on public radio, HPR, and it was for about eight years, I think 2000, 2001 to about 2008 and then there was a little hiatus. People still come up to him and me and say, oh, I listened to you on the radio. Well, actually we're not on the radio and maybe podcasts but we really are on live stream and YouTube now. We also broadcast a show on OC16, a weekly show on OC16 and those are special shows on different topics. So I think that we have identified a niche in the community and with Jay's foresight we've really filled it and continue to fill it. Wow, well, unfortunately we're almost done. Yeah, it's time to wrap it up but this was a great conversation. Thank you, Carol, for coming on and discussing citizen journalism with us. Thank you, Kendra. And we have enjoyed bringing it to you. I'm your host Kendra Austin. We've been talking about community matters, citizen journalism. If you want to see the show again, go to ThinkTechHawaii.com or YouTube.com where this will be a link to this show and many more just like this one. As you may know, ThinkTech is a 501C3 Hawaii non-profit digital media company dedicated to raising public awareness about issues and events that affect our lives together in these islands. To keep going, we need support from my underwriters and from viewers just like you. Please help us by making a contribution on the home page of our website, ThinkTechHawaii.com. Thanks so much to our studio staff and to all the people who watch, care, and contribute to ThinkTech Productions. We'll see you next time for more. Aloha.