Native Hawaiians, new newsrooms work to shift journalism norms in Hawai’i after legacy media exclusion

Anuhea Kāneali‘i’s family has cared for the Papakōlea homestead since the 1940s. Her fourth-generation Native Hawaiian family lives on the oldest Native Hawaiian homestead in what she calls “the heart of tourist central.”

On New Year’s Eve 2024, firework embers caught mesh netting on the mountain above them, starting a wildfire. But the blaze drew no headlines — Kānealiʻi said some of her neighbors didn’t learn about the fire for a year. 

Since then, Kānealiʻi has become the first-ever homestead firewise coordinator for the Hawaiʻi Wildfire Management Organization, and now helps lead the Nā Leo o Papakõlea Firewise, a community partner of Kaheāwai Media. The newsroom seeks to “center the voices of aloha ʻāina and collective liberation movements across Hawaiʻi,” or kia’i, meaning protectors in ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi.

“Homestead, we’re a bunch of aunties and uncles and we speak our own slang and it’s really our own little world,” she said. “We understand we’re not alone and we need help, and the best way to help is to share our story.”

Experiences like Kānealiʻi’s can slip through the cracks because there are fewer media outlets and fewer journalists left to cover them across the Hawaiian Islands — and even fewer Native Hawaiian journalists who can tell these stories with depth and local context. 

Hawaiian storytelling models have been pushed out through colonization, as with the 90-year school ban of the ʻŌlelo Hawai‘i language. Recent journalism projects like Kaheāwai Media are seeking to reconcile the failures of legacy media in Hawai’i by centering Native Hawaiian values and needs, along with hiring Native Hawaiians as part of mastheads. 

A mottled news landscape across Hawai‘i fails to serve Native Hawaiian needs 

A November 2025 Hawai‘i Institute for Public Affairs report predicts that Hawai‘i is approaching the status of a complete state-level news desert. Since 2013, the report’s authors say, about 41.5% of newspaper jobs in Hawai‘i have disappeared. Meanwhile, Hawai‘i’s TV stations face rising shared-service deals, pooling newsgathering to cut costs — consolidation that researchers warn reduces both the quantity and quality of local news. 

But Native Hawaiians and journalists who work with them say traditional news reporting, premised on cold calls, quick turnarounds, and, with the advent of the internet, content for clicks, is at odds with Native Hawaiian culture and the deep oral traditions of the islands. Their deeply connected communities have a history of their stories taken and reframed by outsiders — tensions long visible inside Hawai‘i newsrooms. 

A 2018 Columbia Journalism Review profile found the Hawai’i-based nonprofit Civil Beat had never employed a Hawaiian language expert, leading to errors that some readers critiqued as appropriation. At the time, the outlet’s staff was 74% white — “largely malihini haole,” or white residents from the continental U.S.

Native Hawaiians’ presence on the Hawaiian Islands fell dramatically due to Western colonization and the dissolution of the Hawaiian Kingdom in the late 19th century, and they now live in greater numbers on the continental U.S. than on Hawaiʻi. Recent decades have marked by their outmigration from the islands, tied to some of the highest housing costs in the country. Today, just over 10% of the islands’ population is Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander.

Since then, Native Hawaiian leadership has been more visible in community projects like Hawaiʻi Community Journal and resident efforts like the Hāmākua Times than in the executive staffing of Hawaiʻi’s dominant legacy newsrooms. 

Those initiatives have also motivated a shift from how Civil Beat once approached both staffing and language. In 2010, editors chose not to use Hawaiian diacritical marks except occasionally in names. Amy Pyle, who became the newsroom’s executive editor-in-chief in 2024, told The Objective via email the outlet has since committed to using diacritical marks across all stories, hired a full-time Native Hawaiian reporter to cover Indigenous issues, and launched a pipeline program aimed at getting local and Native Hawaiian journalists into the field. 

Marina Starleaf Riker, a Maui-raised reporter who returned to the islands as Civil Beat’s first Maui correspondent, lost her house to the 2023 Lāhainā fires that devastated the traditional home of Maui royalty and the former capital of the Hawaiian Islands. For Starleaf Riker, much of the coverage lacked basic sensitivity. She recalled returning to her home to clean up debris: “When I went back, there were crews of international folks set up in the parking lot next to me.”

The personal loss and extractive media pressure took a toll, and Riker left journalism. 

“We’re at this time where I think either it could get better or we could have some irreparable harm to the community here,” she said. 

She now works as communications manager for Lāhainā Community Land Trust, a partner of one of the new community-stewarded journalism projects emerging across the islands.

Hawai‘i’s geography compounds the coverage gaps. On smaller islands with higher rural populations, much of the news originates from bigger islands like Hawai‘i or O‘ahu. 

After having her son, Stacey Alapai found herself watching more county council and commission meetings, and noticed a disconnect between what was happening in those rooms and what made the news for community members to witness. 

“I created my public social media accounts just to have more ownership over how I was being represented,” she said. “I couldn’t be used in that way by the media to push a narrative that didn’t align with what I was actually saying.” 

Through her work as a “newsfluencer” on Maui, Alapai posts breakdowns of the conversations in council rooms. However, she has to prioritize the meetings she attends and says the community is “drowning in information.” 

“Who’s gonna read a 500‑page EIS [environmental impact statement]?” she asked. 

In addition to the lack of reporters to parse information, a sparse news landscape in Maui has affected how local government operates, Alapai said. The Maui News, now down to a weekly print run, publishes so infrequently that the county council has struggled to meet the Hawai‘i Sunshine law’s requirement of posting public meeting notices six calendar days in advance. 

“Transparency and access to information is at the core of what we do,” Maui News general manager Jenni DeFouw wrote in an email. “The change to a weekly publication in print presents some new challenges, but we welcome the opportunity to collaborate with the local government to create a solution that better serves them and the community.” 

DeFouw added that their daily e-edition gives agencies additional ways to reach readers. 

Still, Alapai said, “I see we have a media desert.” 

“It’s not even that the journalists we have are doing a bad job,” she said. “It’s that they don’t have enough time to cover it all.” 

Building journalism models with Native Hawaiians, their values, and their history

Native Hawaiian journalists have pushed for reporters to better research and understand the Hawaiian Islands’ history, both during the Lāhainā wildfire and before, through the ʻAhahui Haku Moʻolelo or Hawaiian Journalists Association.

But some reporters have gotten pushback when seeking to add that context. Tyler Sonnemaker had been at Business Insider when reporting a story about Mark Zuckerberg’s land acquisitions on Kaua‘i. He said senior editors pushed him to strip out the political history, key context that explained how Zuckerberg accessed the land in the first place.

Sonnemaker faced a similar experience when he pitched a story to Honolulu Civil Beat about a Big Island community that had successfully pushed back against a luxury eco-resort developer. When the developer withdrew their permit application, Civil Beat’s editors said they’d missed the news window. 

They offered a flat fee of $300 for the story, which Sonnemaker estimated at 20-plus hours of reporting. He turned it down.

“That was the moment I felt very clear we needed to do something different,” he said.

In March 2025, Sonnemaker publicly launched Kaheāwai Media with the intention of centering relationship-building over extractive reporting. 

“You go in-person to develop a relationship with the place, and that’s not a process that you can bypass,” he said.

Sonnemaker learned this slow, relational approach from the ʻāina itself. After leaving Business Insider, he started showing up to mālama ʻāina workdays at Oʻahu loko iʻa. These workdays are community-driven events focused on caring for and restoring the ancient fishponds that Native Hawaiians once managed across the islands as communal aquaculture systems. 

Unlike a traditional newsroom, fishponds offered reciprocity, Sonnemaker said — a balanced exchange where everyone tends the space over time. Kaheāwai mirrors that with storytelling councils and strategy councils of Native Hawaiians, cultural practitioners, and organizers who work with partners, shape questions, and review drafts.

“This model or approach to developing relationships with places and people is much more about a balanced exchange instead of ‘take, take, take,’ which is how journalists often act in showing up, asking for a quote, and then sort of disappearing when that story is done,” he said. 

Kaheāwai isn’t alone in trying to shift how journalism functions on the Hawaiian Islands. The Hawai‘i Community Journal, formerly The Overstory, rebranded on its first anniversary this month. 

“We founded Overstory rooted in community and rooted in community voice,” said Mea Aloha Spady, co-founder of Hawai‘i Community Journal. “Through that process, we realized we needed a more inclusive model.”

The shift leans into solutions journalism with more coverage of community hearings, plus a space for nontraditional story formats written by cultural experts and longtime residents. Spady explained that in their first year, they learned their original investigative focus, deep “overstory” dives, didn’t match what people were seeking. 

“We’re not just a newsroom, we’re not just a nonprofit, and we’re not just Native Hawaiian,” Spady said of the rebrand and intent on changing the name. “We’re doing solutions. It’s deeper systems thinking as opposed to just shining a light on power.”

Without Native Hawaiian perspectives, she added, “you can sometimes miss a lot of the context of this place and the systematic understanding of why we are where we are and how we can move forward.”

Sonnemaker is careful to say Kaheāwai isn’t inventing something new. Kaheāwai’s mode of storytelling is part of a lineage that has always existed in Hawai‘i, from oral history to the Hawaiian-language newspapers of the 19th century. 

“Maybe the way we’re weaving those pieces together is different than what the mainstream media has done,” he said, but it comes from “looking at that long tradition and how people do that storytelling today, and learning from that, then pulling in what works from journalism and pointing it in a different direction.”

Ultimately, Sonnemaker is hoping Kaheāwai can be a part of something larger — “a constellation of folks in this ecosystem who are doing great work.”

“My hope isn’t for Kaheāwai to become, island-wide, the biggest media company,” he said. “My hope is that every community across Hawai‘i has place-based, rooted storytellers who can tell their own community stories and feel supported.”

For Kānealiʻi, the homestead firewise coordinator, the stakes of stewarding land are not abstract. The volcano erupted in early March. The fire risk is constant. Sea levels are rising, and on O’ahu, a storm resulted in the worst floods in 20 years while a dam undermaintained by Dole Food Co. — which knew about the risk — could burst, swelled by rainfall. On Maui, the same storm last week closed off access to a major highway.

“Being Hawaiian in 2026 is being aware of the fire and the water, being aware of all the elements,” she said. “We’re on a rock in the middle of the ocean.”

So Kaheāwai’s next storytelling project is on water. To Kānealiʻi, it’s a continuation of a story already in motion.

“We’re not sharing for exposure,” she said. “We’re sharing for awareness. And that’s where Kaheāwai gets it.”

Update, Mar. 31: This piece was updated to clarify the nature of Civil Beat’s use of diacritical marks and of its proposed payment to Sonnemaker.

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Amelia Wu is a California-based journalist focused on public service reporting, with work appearing in The Dallas Morning News, The Sacramento Bee, and CalMatters.

This piece was edited by James Salanga. Copy edits by Marlee Baldridge.