Julia Neal is the backbone of the Ka’ū Calendar, a 16-page community newspaper covering local news and events in the southern portion of Hawai’i’s Big Island. 

Like clockwork for the past 21 years, Neal works late into the night before the first of every month to send the final draft of her independently published newspaper to the printers on the neighboring island of O’ahu.

After they are printed, the 7,500 papers are shipped via plane back to Neal, where she loads them in her Suzuki Carry and trucks them down to the post office. From there, 5,000 copies of the Calendar are dispersed to every mailbox in the rural Ka’ū district — free of charge to readers. The rest are placed on news stands in communities across Ka’ū.

Julia Neal started her community’s independent monthly newspaper 21 years ago. As the primary reporter, editor, and publisher, she often jokes that she is married to the paper. (Photo by Anya Petrone Slepyan)

Neal sees the Ka’ū Calendar as an institution that builds the self-esteem of her community and offers paths toward civic engagement. 

“I hope to help inspire people to know about their town and the issues so that the community can get involved,” Neal said. 

This is a critical service, Neal said, because local news in the Ka’ū district is often overlooked by publications that are based in the larger population centers. 

“The other papers, they don’t get out here,” Neal said in an interview with the Daily Yonder. “We’re sort of neglected because we’re just too far.” 

There’s a reason that Hawai’i County is commonly referred to as the “Big Island”. The island is more than 5,000 square miles, bigger than the state of Connecticut, but with only a fraction of the population at just over 200,000 residents.

The island does not have any incorporated cities but is split into nine administrative districts, containing small village communities.

The two large population centers on the island are Kona on the West side (population 23,000) and Hilo on the East side (population 45,000), each home to one of the island’s two daily print newspapers.

And although these two papers and several online publications cover island-wide news, gaps in local news coverage are common in the sparsely populated rural districts and villages across Hawai’i County. 

Parts of Ka’ū, for example, are almost a two-hour drive from Kona, and more than an hour’s drive from Hilo.

On the Island’s northern coast, residents of the Hāmākua district say they rarely see coverage of their communities in the county-wide publications. 

“They’ll come out here if there’s a murder, or for our week-long Western Week festival that’s promoted like crazy,” Nicole Garcia, director of the Honoka’a Heritage Center, told the Daily Yonder. “But otherwise, there’s no presence at all.”

Like Ka’ū, residents of Hāmākua have their own solution – another free monthly paper called the Hāmākua Times, which has been published for 25 years.  

The Hāmākua Times continues a long tradition of small, local papers published on the northern coast of the Big Island. The monthly paper is shown with a series of publications from the 1950s, some of which were published by sugar plantations. (Photo by Anya Petrone Slepyan)

At a time when researchers are sounding the alarm about shrinking local news coverage and expanding “news deserts” – especially in rural areas – the Big Island offers a different sort of case study. 

Researchers have coined the term “news desert” to describe communities “with limited access to the sort of credible and comprehensive news and information that feeds democracy at a grassroots level.” One nationwide study found that one-third of newspapers that closed shop from 2004 to 2018 were rural.

With two daily papers on the Island, the county is not considered a news desert. But this binary determination that a place either is or isn’t a news desert can overshadow other important questions about the state of local news, like the quality of the daily newspapers and the presence of community papers and online media that fills the gaps. 

News Deserts on the Big Island

The advent of the internet and online news has been an important factor in the shuttering of local newspapers. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the rise of internet media caused newspaper publishers’ revenue to fall an estimated 52% between 2002 and 2022. Many papers that have stayed in print have done so only by slashing costs: significantly reducing staffing levels as well as the size and content of their print products. 

The Big Island has also been affected by these national trends. Nancy Cook Lauer saw the effects of print revenue loss firsthand as a reporter for West Hawaii Today in Kona. She said that cuts began in earnest when West Hawaii Today was bought by Oahu Publications Inc., which owns five newspapers across the state.

“They just downscaled everything,” Cook Lauer said. “It was like, if everyone is gone, we can still make a profit. Or at least won’t lose so much money.” 

Over the course of a decade of reporting at West Hawaii Today, Cook Lauer saw the staff decrease from eight to nine full-time employees to just a single reporter. The paper shares most of its coverage with its sister publication, the Hawaii Tribune-Herald in Hilo, which currently employs four reporters and an editor/publisher. 

Cook Lauer retired from reporting in 2022 and now serves as an advisor to the student newspaper at the University of Hilo. But she remains concerned by the shrinking of the island’s active press corps, and particularly publications’ reduced ability to cover the local government. 

Nancy Cook Lauer advises the student newspaper at the University of Hilo. As a long-time political reporter, she is troubled by the decline in government watchdog reporting on the Island. “Journalists should be feared,” she said. “Officials should know that there’s somebody watching them.” (Photo by Anya Petrone Slepyan)

“At county council meetings, there used to be a table in the back for media. And when I came [to the Big Island] in 2009, there were nine slots. It then went down to three slots, and for the past two years, I was the only reporter that ever sat there and did journalism at the county council meetings,” Cook Lauer said. 

Now, she says reporting on local governance is sporadic. “Local governments are just free to do whatever they want,” she said. “No one is covering them.” 

The Daily Yonder has reported on the effects of newspaper closures in rural communities, and how that may lead to disengagement from public life.

Another factor contributing to reduced local news coverage on the Big Island is the relatively high cost of living, especially housing, Cook Lauer said. This can lead to high rates of turnover in newsroom staff, further undermining local news coverage. 

With so few reporters covering the major population centers, it is no surprise that the Big Island’s smaller and more remote communities see little print coverage.

Nikki Usher, Ph.D. and associate professor of communication studies at the University of San Diego, suggested in their recently published article that local news outlets should be assessed more critically, as some may not even offer news content that is geographically relevant to their local readers. 

Looking more critically at the gaps in the Big Island’s local news coverage, Hawai’i County begins to seem more like a news desert. 

But the internet age also requires us to think more expansively about potential news sources beyond daily print newspapers. Historically, daily newspapers have been the most important and reliable source of daily news. But with the internet, social media, and other alternative forms of communication, local papers are no longer the only source of news.

Usher writes that to truly understand the health of a local news system, one must understand the identities and lives of the people who live there, and how they receive and share their news and information — including creative alternatives.

Filling the Gaps

Monthly community papers like the Ka’ū Calendar and Hāmākua Times offer one solution to fill the gaps in local media coverage on the Big Island. Online publications provide another. 

Megan Moseley is a reporter with Big Island Now, an online publication owned by the Pacific Media Group. In addition to her general assignment reporting, Moseley focuses specifically on issues facing rural communities, including tourism and infrastructure disputes in the sacred Waipi’o Valley and development in Miloli’i, the Big Island’s “last fishing village.” 

Covering these communities is critical, Moseley told the Daily Yonder, because they are part of the social fabric of the island. “What is Hawai’i without Waipi’o and Miloli’i?” she said. 

Megan Mosely aims to consistently cover rural communities on the Big Island, including disputes over tourism, infrastructure, and farming rights in the sacred Waipi’o Valley. (Photo by Anya Petrone Slepyan)

Another publication, Environment Hawai’i, publishes statewide investigative environmental reporting. The monthly publication—which is available both in print and online—frequently covers land and water disputes affecting rural communities, said founder and editor Patricia Tummons in an interview with the Daily Yonder. 

Because Environment Hawai’i is a monthly investigative publication, Tummons says she has time on her side, unlike the understaffed daily papers. “We constantly monitor sources of potential stories, like board and commission meetings and recent court filings for example,” Tummons said. “And the local news doesn’t do that.” 

The non-profit newsroom Honolulu Civil Beat has also expanded its coverage of rural communities on the Big Island and elsewhere through its pop-up newsroom program, according to Managing Editor Kim Gamel. Hosted at public libraries across the state, the pop-ups increase public access to reporters and have inspired a number of local stories. 

Still, no publication covers rural districts like Ka’ū and Hāmākua as consistently as their monthlies. But this past year has revealed the vulnerabilities of volunteer-driven community papers, which are often spearheaded by passionate individuals and depend on their personal philanthropy.

The Hāmākua Times was created 25 years ago by David Becker, who passed away unexpectedly in June of 2023. In the months surrounding Becker’s death, several editions were not published. 

“We had people come in all the time, asking ‘is it coming back?’ ‘What’s going to happen?’” said Nicole Garcia. “People missed it. It was a major piece in this town.”

So Garcia, along with several other volunteers, decided to restart the paper. 

Nicole Garcia is the director of the Honoka’a Heritage Center. She is one of several volunteers who has revived the community monthly, the Hāmākua Times, after the unexpected death of the paper’s founder and previous publisher. (Photo by Anya Petrone Slepyan)

“We put out a call out for contributors who might want to help, and we actually had quite a number of people offering what they might have,” Garcia said. The paper, which is available both in print and online, has since published several issues, thanks to the efforts of newly involved community volunteers.

Julia Neal, who is primarily responsible for the publication of the Ka’ū Calendar, has her own concerns for the future. Local advertisements pay for the printing and distribution of the paper, but Neal, who has over 50 years of experience in journalism, volunteers her time and skills to the project. Some community members, including local students, contribute photographs, columns and articles. Others help with editing and laying out the paper, as well as the papers’ distribution. But most of the work is done by Neal, who said she spends an estimated 90 hours per month reporting, editing, and producing the Calendar and its accompanying website and facebook page without compensation. 

“I’m getting older,” said Neal, who turned 74 this fall. “So if this is going to continue, I need to build a future for it financially.” She said she hopes to increase the paper’s advertising revenue so that she can create a salaried position for the next publisher. 

The Future of Journalism on the Big Island

Neal is also working to develop the next generation of journalists in Ka’ū. She has started teaching journalism classes once a week at the local middle school and works with a 13-year-old intern. Her goal is to show them how journalism supports community engagement. 

“I asked my class, why do we do this?” Neal said. “And I told them, all these stories are about things the community can participate in.” 

Neal is not alone in her quest to educate future Hawai’i journalists. Tiffany Edwards Hunt moved to the Big Island to report for West Hawai’i Today, and later became an advisor of Ke Kalahea (“The Prayer”), the student news publication at the University of Hilo. She also ran her own independent news blog and monthly print paper, and helped found the student paper at Kea’au Middle School in the Puna district, where she now teaches. 

Hunt sees this as an important investment in the future of journalism. She believes that the next generation of journalists may pioneer new models of sharing reliable news.

“I don’t know what it looks like because I have a frame of mind of a 47-year-old,” she said. “But maybe my middle schoolers will be able to see it.”

Cook Lauer, the current advisor of the Hilo University student paper Ke Kalahea, also wants to see more young reporters on the island. She hopes the student paper can inspire youth who grew up on the island.

“It’s important that they have some background in what’s going on here,” she said. “Especially the culture and the geography.”

Students at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa in Honolulu have also had a growing interest in journalism and communication studies, said Brett Oppegaard, a communications professor at the university.

The program has more than tripled the number of journalism majors in the past several years, he said.

“We have arguably the most diverse student population at any university in the country and our journalism students reflect that,” he said. “I think that’s a strength that a lot of our students have in terms of the professional ranks.”

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