The Hawaii Tribune-Herald reports it was “honored for journalistic excellence” at a Society of Professional Journalists banquet in Honolulu Friday night. In fact, the brief states HTH was “a finalist in Editorial Opinion category” for an editorial entitled, “No bailouts for Aloha or ATA,” written by editor David Bock.
In the coverage about HTH’s kudos from SPJ, it states that in April the Hawaii Publishers Association gave a second place Pa’i Award to HTH for David Bock’s editorial “blasting anti-business legislation passed by the state Legislature.”
the two times per year that David Bock writes an editorial, he gets awarded by our esteemed professional organizations. I’m being facetious; it’s possible that David Bock writes more than two editorials a year. Truly, it’s not very often that he does write editorials, and I’ve heard people in the community complain that HTH does not take a stand on issues often enough.
David Bock actually wrote an editorial on Sunday, June 21, 2009, “Build the TMT on Mauna Kea,” about the Thirty Meter Telescope. I don’t know if you saw it; it was right next to the Gary Hoff cartoon roasting Emily Naeole. While I thought that particular Gary Hoff cartoon was in poor taste, I really liked David Bock’s perspective about the prospect of TMT coming to the mountaintop and I resonated with everything he wrote. I personally am crossing my fingers that TMT chooses Mauna Kea over Cerro Armazones in Chile as the site for its $1 billion project. More on my opinion about TMT in a subsequent blog entry.
One of West Hawaii Today editor Reed Flickinger’s redeeming qualities is that he is opinionated. Now. too often those opinions bleed over onto the front page, but that’s another story I’ve told you before (here and here and here). Suffice it to say, I’m one of those HTH readers that enjoys the opinion page, and I appreciate the editor of the newspaper coming out on a side now and then.

































June 29th, 2009 at 9:13 am
HTH both honored for excellence and a laughing stock of integrity. Only in Hawaii!
June 29th, 2009 at 10:19 am
Tribune Herald cartoonist, Gary Hoff submitted a very negative cartoon on government workers and played right into the anti government worker campaign of the Lingle administration. The 6/7/09 cartoon offended many of us hard working civil servants and led many of us to outright cancel our subcriptions to the Tribune. We all laughed when they got the award!