 We're live. It's community matters and we have the joy. You know the total delight of having Ian Linde with us today. iLinde.net okay investigative reporter for about a thousand years. Ian, we are delighted and honored to have you on the show. Thanks for coming here. Thank you very much. I'm glad to be here. You participated in the show last Thursday. I should say show is a symposium. We call it the morning media symposium at the Plaza Club upstairs and you were a panel I guess in Steve Petrenik's panel and you gave a really brilliant discussion. So the first thing I'd like to know is where do you think that media symposium fits in the world of understanding media in our state? Well it helps underscore why there's such disarray. One of the interesting points was the hypothetical was taken. If I could have hired 20 people to start a new media operation what would I do? And the answers are very informative. I said well it depends what you want to do. Are you going to print something? Are you going to have a podcast? Or you're going to have some of the people can watch like you do here? And the data were very different. They had to explain. Look writing stuff you pay for reporters and editors but that's not where your money is. When you get to a podcast that takes time, that takes technology, that takes super amounts of editing and videos can be even worse if you're not just telling a simple story. So it depends what you want to do. If you wanted to do podcasts you may only you might have to have six people working on the podcast and three editors and and whereas you have reporters if you had 20 people maybe you could have 12 reporters and editors and so it depends what you want to do and that's difficult when all media now are being pressured to distribute their news in every different way. They can't high balls and hits and whatnot but all combined right. You can't choose which one to do because there's all this pressure to do all of them. I should tell the story here how much this has changed. So in 1999 I was working at the Star Bulletin, the old Honolulu Star Bulletin when word came down that newspaper was going to be sold. It ended up there was a lawsuit. It became the first time in American history that we know of that a federal judge said you can't stop publishing your newspaper under court order unless you make an attempt to sell it. What about in voluntary service but never mind. Never mind. Well I got caught in the middle. I thought well they told us we're going to close in 60 days. I said well what what can I do in 60 days that's different than we were hearing about all across the country newspapers being closed. So I said I'll go online and I'll write about it every day what's happening in the newsroom what people are thinking how we feel about it. What a great idea. What the news is. I thought 60 days it'll be over. Well it stretched out for you know a year and a half before before things were finally settled. Along the way I decided well I just kept doing it. I was on my side and at that time there wasn't a word yet for blog. By blogging the word blog was just coming into use but wasn't really in general use yet. So I didn't know I was doing a blog. I was just writing every day. So we got to uh newspaper was sold and under the it remains under that same management now with the combined newspaper and we were all called in told we had to be interviewed to retain our jobs. Okay so. Happy time for everyone. Happy time. I walked in and I got I felt I was ambushed. The top editor who was there looked at me and said well Ian do you think it's fair that you have a blog? I said I said what um I never thought about that. I said do you think it's fair you have a newspaper? And things went down from there. But the bottom line is if you go online and look up reporters fired for blogging. I became the first reporter in America that's recorded for having been essentially losing their job for doing a blog. And actually looking back that was totally ridiculous because because now now there's always a question you have to have a blog. Right that's how much time things have changed in 20 years. Yeah. Oh anyway where were we? I was going to ask you about the stats you got out of your panel because Steve Petraniak is like famous for stats. Right. And he was reporting stats and you were talking about stats. What stats stick in your mind Ian? Okay well he had the 47% of people overall in this survey preferred to watch their news rather than read or listen to their news. 41% so pretty close wanted to read and 19% preferred to listen to a podcast or audio, NPR. So and then when those are broken down it was younger people who overwhelmingly wanted to read 50 and older preferred watching and 65 and older preferred watching by a great margin two to one margin. So that you don't really think about it that way you think younger people are probably more in tune with all the tech things. Yeah yeah well I mean it's interesting because what you were talking about before touches on something I wanted to ask you and so does this and it's the idea is the press does whether you like it or not whether it intends to do that or not it does shape public opinion sometimes dramatically some irreversibly sometimes wrongly. So the question is to me it's not necessarily hits it's not necessarily what you know what age group it's what do you do if you want to affect public opinion? See that's a different question than if you are a businessman running a media business you're wanting to know how do I monetize influence in public opinion how do I monetize my daily news. In my own position I never had to do that. The closest I came was I did a one person newsletter for three or four years three years actually about how I politics and money and that was great fun because you could run between the legs of the daily news reporters and get all kinds of stories that they missed. So I think that's still the case and probably would be more the case now than it was then because now you have more tools now you have your phone can give you broadcast quality video and audio your your laptop computer can be your work your workplace your office wherever you are you have six graders who take their iPad and make really nice looking videos that you see on television sometimes now. It's a different world and there's much more that a single person or small group of people could do you're doing it here you get a bigger group of people but but you are an example of nimble small scale think little media and news production. Yeah well we we like the idea of reaching out to people and we like the idea of touching things as you do that means something that are maybe sacred cows and we'll talk about that later but I just I just wonder if you were going to start scratch and and making a profit bottom line doesn't matter how would you affect more people affect their thinking how would you how would you shape public opinion in these days there's a good reason for that because the question I asked at the end during your panel I was sort of trying to get at that is that shaping public opinion actually can be converted into money if you effectively like Cambridge Analytica can shape public opinion and elections somebody will pay you for that look at Facebook that's what's happening right so my question is what what what techniques would you use what media would you select what approach would you take to shape public opinion in a big way whoa that's a toughy I guess I'd be on television my own experience was okay I publish a newsletter and I beat the dailies on the story and my my thousand or twelve hundred readers got to read that everybody felt good so then I was picked up by the daily newspapers and they'd run a story but then every once in a while and actually for a short period of time I had a deal where I'd appear on television um and I discussed that story well when I was on television everybody would say hey Ian I heard about your story or I read your story or I heard your story that was really great later I was on the worked at the star bulletin head with these front page headline investigative stories across the newspaper and someone would say oh your newspaper wrote a good had a good story I forget what it was about um who and I said well that's my story and people had no idea so I found for whatever reason at least at that time that television um appearance was worth five times what the front page appearance was worth and ten times what my newsletter was worth except that you have to look at the food chain in my view you don't really necessarily want to affect the most people because that's when you have to lower yourself down to the lowest common denominator yes you want to affect um opinion leaders those those who other people look to when they're trying to decide what should I think about this I'll check out what so-and-so says or the people in your school or in your workplace who drive opinion those are the people you want to reach and I think those people are probably more discerning and want more detail and more substance than the average um television viewer or newspaper reader and so you know to get the most people you really got to dumb down I hate to say it that way but that's really what you need to do problem and and but to give people the ammunition ammunition they need you need to detail up smash in as much as you can you know I like to bounce something off you I've been thinking about this lately sure it's it comes out of uh mr palmiere who is my seventh grade teacher he taught me a reputation of my teres studio room which was latin for repetition as the mother of study so and a lot of uh you know you write for the newspaper you have a blog and television radio whatever it is so if you if you hit it three times or four even twice you're having a multiplier effect their rapid repetition is the mother of study you're you're getting in there and if I'm a viewer listener reader and I hear it twice three times four times it takes on much more than if I heard it only once on one media you agree with me about that do you think that you can group you have a greater effect on public opinion if you can have the multiplier effect in multiple media definitely and and over time not just multiple media but more importantly over time you hear it this week and then next two weeks from now there's a follow-up story that's add some more detail or takes a different angle and pretty soon you might actually remember that oh I remember this is an issue that's been around for a while um so that's that's really important to to have a follow-through and momentum on a story a little your things that come and go on a daily basis they disappear but if they're cumulative that's where you get your impact yeah I remember a story about somebody wanted to plant false news fake news and uh maybe this was camera camera channel okay and they started by putting it in completely unknown newspaper in some unknown city in India okay it sat there it sat there for months and then they played it again and this time they quoted the story out of the Indian newspaper as if that had some credibility to it and they sort of leveraged the thing up you know and it was geometric it was quite quite remarkable but let me let me go to the next thing I want to ask you about I was stunned I was delighted I was so happy when you went through your your thing about sacred sacred cows because it's totally true we live in a we live in a very unusual place without characterizing it's different this place and we have sacred cows we don't touch with a 10-foot pole and result is we don't learn about them and we don't criticize them and we don't change them can you can you sort of summarize what you were saying that day last week sure um I use this technique as a way of finding stories that an investigative reporter willing to go beyond the daily beat could beat everybody else right even though they're out there every day producing stories and so I thought I would sit down and think about what are the institutions or individuals or or organizations that affect our lives affect a whole bunch of people but that we don't really see in the news we don't know much so we don't know much about so there's no public accountability for your panel I went through and I made my my current what I would say my current list and at the top of that list I would put and I don't I'm not sure how to phrase this the Hawaiian community okay we have all these issues on the front pages now for months and on the weekly front pages for years TMT for example but we don't know and have no little sense of and reporters don't seem to know well who are the institutions in the Hawaiian community who have probably have opinions about this that may not be expressed you know we have a very vibrant Hawaiian community out there the Hawaiian civic clubs the homestead associations the chamber of commerce you know you've got all nonprofits the elite trust the royal the royal societies and and we don't cover these things you know you can have a whole beat somebody covering all of the states Hawaiian civic clubs and all the fights and the politics and who's going where and who's saying what about whom it would be a fascinating look so when it comes down to suddenly we have a current issue and it's making headlines and we only know what a few vocal people in the center of these protests for example we only know what they think about it what about the broader community where are they where are the tensions where are the differences that's why I say it to me that's a sacred cow that proper reporting ongoing over a period of time would would give us more understanding of how you might resolve this otherwise you know impossible situation opaque yeah yeah totally and it just reminds me of one thing before we go on to the next sacred cow is that is that people don't understand how hard it is to be a reporter to write an email and ask for things to pick up the phone and ask for things go wait out somebody's office and wait and ask for things because most people they don't they don't want to talk to you they don't like reporters they don't like the media they don't want to be embarrassed or worse and so they don't talk to you and so to be a reporter really requires some really important people skills and persistence am I right very much so this raises one of the other significant points that came up during the panel discussion and that was Peter Rossig from Hawaiian Electric used to be a very good reporter and editor Peter said you know he's been working at Hawaiian Electric for some time dealing with the news media he said in the old days you know you'd get these grizzled old business reporters who knew everything about your business and they could put you on the spot but they could also take the information you gave him and understand it and they knew what they were doing and you worried when they walked into your office because you were really going to get grilled this is now you get young um kind of general assignment reporters are sent over you know mr. Rossig what do you do what what's going on here and here's my press release yes exactly and it's really well read one to use this but no what's worse he said I want them to understand he wants them to understand but there's you know no level of the background isn't there they don't have the background that reporters eat reporters used to have people who covered a particular area so they knew the issues they knew the people they knew the companies now one of the other panelists responded to that and he kind of said well you know actually this works out really well because the audience doesn't know anything either and so and so your reporters who are fresh and come to a fresh look they'll know they'll be able to explain that to the the general audience so we could all be an oblivion together well it took me a while I had to go home and look at my nose and go you know that doesn't make any sense but I don't know how you get around that because again like like investigative reporters are expensive and beat reporters who are retained because they know they're beat and they've built credibility over time and the Rolodex Rolodex is everything um you know that's expensive too and so I don't know how you get around this how do you make that business sustainable economically while at the same time holding on to the things that worked in the past that now now they see as funny daddy you know having beat reporters assigned that was a luxury of an old an old day gone by and you know I'm not sure how you how you function without it well you must have some thoughts about how you how the press how the media can be sustainable in this city and perhaps in the country there must be things that can be done are you nibbling away at that issue well I went back and we had a we had a friend who was a former university professor who through the vietnam war era got kicked out of his university and so anyway he ended up with having a small group of friends six maybe maybe like a half a dozen people and for 20 years they put on what they called the great Atlantic radio conspiracy it was a weekly radio program on a specific issue whether it was an economic issue a social issue a different one every week a different one every week a different one they use they cut a deal with the local community college radio station so they got radio time the studio time like this and for 20 years they put out this series of things they weren't paid everybody had day jobs they were committed and and they got very good at what they did you know it's hard to come up with an analogy of that today of um and translated into money and well see sometimes you have to we got a lot of retired reporters a lot of underemployed reporters because of all the cutbacks and news for the last 20 years um you have people you know i and my wife worked at the university so when i was unemployed and started newsletter instead i could fall back on that cushion and that helped me get through but it also showed that with if you had a position to cut you a little slack you could get a lot done media wise so i'm saying that the future of the press is in altruism uh it's in volunteerism it's in citizen journalism uh no only looking at it from the bottom as you know i'm a news consumer most of the time yeah until i get mad and say you know i can do better than that and i'll shoot out a blog post or something yeah um i'm looking for the little things that people can do and let let somebody else take it up the chain you know when i did my newsletter eventually after three years i got a job offer i'd never worked in the newspaper i never took a journalism class but i was beating reporters every month um you know that maybe that's that's one way as people you know cut their chops on on their independent media and then become part of the business and they they're going to change um from the inside they're going to help change the way things are going i would hope yeah but you know my thing about uh repetitio martes to the autumn actually does translate into money if you noticed uh every time you look at kindle every time you look uh some reporter is writing a book some of them write a couple of books a year maybe more and they sell those books they promote those books wherever they appear the result is they're making money individually i suppose because their media is not really benefiting and that's a way to make it sustainable at least for them the other thing the other thing is um is uh um movies take a look at front line right one of my favorite things those guys the ones who are writing it thinking it through doing the investigation they're reporters and they're making money with that the problem with that model is those front lines cost a million bucks or you know indeed right now i think the other way i think you know since any eight-year-old with a phone can go and produce an interview with a newsmaker that none of us get to see because all we get are sound bites and make that available for free the same way you do on youtube why aren't we why aren't we seeing more of that why why don't you know how disruptive would that be when you when you would come to the six o'clock news and say why do i need to watch for 15 seconds i can go over here and i can watch an hour interview with somebody who'd be really interesting and helpful for me to know and they only give them 15 seconds on the news that's something we can do today and i'm not sure how you package that you're as close as i know well i think the word packaging is critical you have to provide the platform you have to make it happen every day or whenever you whatever interval you're promising and then you get that fresh news you get the fresh approach you get people who are really out there you know thinking outside the box and that i would i want to see that always uh that you know that's my my passion but you got to provide a platform and the platform costs money uh so it's somewhere in the middle of all of that yes where i think the future lies but let's uh let's go back to uh some some sacred cows we only got started with one i got started i got my others on my list i like Hawaii airports as a sacred cow you know they've been in the news recently worst airport in the country almost is Honolulu um and the airports are an institution part of our state government that doesn't have the normal accountability one reason for example is they have a dedicated source of funding so when legislators and the transportation committees rumble fusses you know we got you guys get in here and show us tell us why things are so screwed up or we're going to cut oh we can't cut your budget because your budget's guaranteed because it comes from all those airline fees and concession fees so the airports can basically say no get lost they're they're uncovered except one on those occasions when the fraud and abuse um becomes so bad that somebody's busted and goes to the slammer and has a trial and whatever and that goes through the news cycle for maybe three weeks yeah but the airports are also they're landlords they're landowners um they have all those problems they're environmental centers for um where their environmental impact needs to be examined um it's a bureaucratic empire that used to be much more political but now it may be that the politics are just behind the scenes and on the bureaucracy we don't know because we don't report on them there's no airport well the legislation has been trying to form the airport authority and it at its best the airport authority would provide some public window they'd have to have public meetings etc um whether that's going to happen again that way alone yes exactly um after that uh i say how about real estate you know real estate is a big business it's not just you're glossy oh look at the house in my neighborhood that's for sale either too high or too low for me to worry about um it's a business every month the state produces a list of people in that business who have been fined or violating the rules or violating the laws sometimes they lose their licenses sometimes they just pay fines what's going on behind the scenes what drives that business how does the real estate industry affect the housing market um how does the real how has the real estate industry in the past um had the problem of illegal rentals people renting their bedroom a bedroom closet or outside thing with a you know extension cord run to the to the outside shed i mean this is what's happening in people and the real estate industry pushes that because it provides more housing for people and it does but it also drives the price of housing up just like air bnb kind of things do the real estate industry um i put organized labor in there you know people come a lot of people complain you know though it's those unions that push the legislature around it gets they always get what they want and we don't know much at all about what goes on inside those unions you know we can't name their officials really and maybe the top guy but you know but not even that we most people couldn't even name well what are the big kind of different kinds of unions and are they get do they get along or not get along about the private worker unions versus the public worker unions or the afsby unions versus whoever you know we just don't know and we and because we don't know we don't inform their members or the general public um how to understand the issues surrounding those unions there's two things pop to mind one is what you were saying about the native Hawaiian community uh and that is we we may know the very top level we know may know what they want us to know and press releases but we don't know what's going on we can't even name the people and the other thing is that um it's just it's not it's not raw meat right it's boring real estate boom boring people don't want to hear about this stuff they don't want to hear what we need is somebody will dig down in the detail and tell us exactly how it works educate us about these institutions we need that correct are we going to get that i'm not holding my breath but um i mean i sure hope that people are going to emerge to do that and their editors out there looking for good ideas and maybe they're going to stumble on some of these i have to pay for those anyway one last question we're almost out of time and that is uh you know i'm very interested in um advocacy journalism where the newspaper i mean i'm just a wild example in civil beat besides they want to write about climate change all year um like we shouldn't forget it and indeed we shouldn't forget it and in order you know you've got to get by the haven't we heard this before syndrome and write about some different aspect every week every day whatever it is and you have to write action points not just yes we have climate change i heard that already gotta write something new um it's the same thing with advocacy in general you would you attack something and you work on it and work on it work on it and when you do that i just want your reaction to when you when you do that you really have to take a moral position position that the editor feels is going to improve the community you know one one thing uh just sort of sort of at the stage for you is act 221 we're showing how spent 10 years being up back 20 221 and at the end of that 10 years linda lingle to her delight you know killed it um and and just at the middle of that period there was a headline banner okay and it said act 221 investors found to be wealthy holy moly now that's a revelation you can see how how down the Honolulu advertiser was on act 221 because people love to hear those raw meat stories so my question to you is you know can we achieve something where the newspaper actually takes a moral position that benefits community and be is there anything wrong with advocacy type journalism well our new speaker is going to do it i doubt it because the the accepted professional norm is you have an editorial side that can editorialize all they want can scream and yell can be the wall street journal for business when it comes to your new side you try and be straight in there down the down the center make it you know as accurate and as full and complete as you can and let people draw their and not not be driven by the editorial positions that's always been that's been the traditional approach but what we have now is raw meat rules so if i if i'm up on top of the mountain making a mess and threatening people and death threats what have you and stopping everybody i get the press every time i do that i i can i can systematically achieve headline status with those stories and meanwhile other media is saying wait a minute telescopes are good for us are they saying that and in as regular a basis and after what six months of this actually more sir um how has public opinion been been affected it seems to me that part of the problem here is the way the media has handled it and the way the participants have have um done their job from their point of view um the kimchi opponents have been have had a dynamite um public relations program driven by social media one that i think everyone the back no one was considered that they would be this successful for this long um but i think you are right that the failure of the media is oh we filled our tmt quota for today so don't bother digging any deeper we're getting the other side or fleshing out the um a picture that's it for today on to tomorrow and tomorrow is more courts crime protests and what a reveal accidents right so i don't we obviously have i mean there there have been crusading newspapers in our past and you know that's really yellow journalism that that whole attitude towards that kind of thing however i do think that um you know in the future partly is going to be um non-profit journalism right journalism that relies on grants and donations and whatever well i think partly is going to be more organizations setting up their own news sources whether it's unions um nonprofits you know hmsa has a their their news thing going i don't think if you if you had news people news people running it it would look different but the unions have newspapers again if they had newspaper people running them they'd look different and be more effective um but those are those are institutions that have some money have an interest in um affecting public opinion and are in a position to fund it as they go along i i think we are going to see more of that as well adding to competition with the mainstream daily media yeah yeah wow there's more there's more and um you know we hope you agree that we should get back together again and explain because it you know whatever we size up as the issues of the day they'll be more tomorrow that's right exactly right that's the name of the game so one last thing is at this program um media for the first panel and Steve for the second panel asked you to summarize and asked you to come up with a word i don't know if you actually came up with a word but i would like you to do that now um confusion i think that's you know look at what's going on in the media all over the country everyone is searching for the holy grail that no one has found on how to make this happen the best with the best impact for the public um and the most accountability also for the public great discussion all right thank you so much