Today's final edition of The Honolulu Advertiser ends a 154-year run that helped document and define the course of Island life from the days of the Hawaiian kingdom to the arrival of jets and the digital age.
Honolulu is now a one-newspaper town for the first time in its history. Like Seattle and Denver, cities that also lost newspapers as the global recession deepened, Honolulu will now adjust to life with only one thump on the front step, one headline peeking from the newsbox on the corner.
The death of The Advertiser came at 12:01 a.m. today after a decades-long newspaper war with its neighbor just makai on South Street, the Honolulu Star-Bulletin.
The closing also marks the shutdown of one of Hawai'i's oldest and largest businesses. About 400 people will lose their jobs — most at The Advertiser, but also about 91 workers at the printing plant in Kanē'ohe that produces the Star-Bulletin and MidWeek.
The surviving daily will debut as a broadsheet tomorrow with a new name that pays homage to both newspapers: the Honolulu Star-Advertiser.
The company will employ about 474 workers — including 265 hired from the Advertiser, among them 28 editors, reporters, columnists and a photographer — and will be produced at the plant built by The Advertiser in Kapolei in 2004.
The Advertiser's landmark, 81-year-old News Building at 605 Kapi'olani Blvd., which has been on the market for five years, is now closed.
No comments:
Post a Comment