Daryl Cagle Recounts the Hawaii Newspaper Wars

Last week Honolulu Star-Bulletin bought Honolulu Advertiser, laying off almost half of the newspaper staff in the state and leaving its residents with one daily paper.

The widely syndicated and current San Fernando Valley dweller, Daryl Cagle, recalls his time in the middle of the war between the dailies:

In 1995 I was drawing a syndicated panel called “TRUE!” for Tribune Media Services and one of my subscribers was The Midweek, a weekly free newspaper in that was delivered to every address in Hawaii. The Midweek ran the supermarket ads on Wednesdays, taking a bite out of the dailies; they were upgrading and switching to a new tabloid format and wanted a local editorial cartoonist for their new editorial page, and they gave me a call. That was the start of my late career change to being a political cartoonist.

My local cartoons became one of their most popular features. I sniped from the sidelines as the evil Advertiser tried to kill off their competitor, the feisty Star-Bulletin, in a newspaper war that seemed to drag on forever. There were underhanded dealings and angry employee journalists with hurt feelings and blogs boiling over with passion – wonderful stuff for a cartoonist.

Read the whole piece here.

Previously on FBLA:

‘Catastrophic’: Almost Half of O’ahu Newspaper Jobs Cut

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