Letter from the Publisher

To paraphrase a great American writer: Rumors of our demise have been greatly exaggerated.

September 16, 2012

Dear The Garden Island Readers,

To paraphrase a great American writer: Rumors of our demise have been greatly exaggerated.

It’s probably fitting we’d choose to quote Mark Twain. Before he was Mark Twain, he was Samuel Clemens, a writer for the Muscatine Journal, a sister publication in the Lee Enterprises group of newspapers of which The Garden Island newspaper is a member.

It’s a good reminder of the heritage and strength of local newspapers. A newspaper like the Muscatine Journal can claim deep, deep roots extending back to the days of Clemens. For us here in Lihu‘e, you’d be hard-pressed to find a business with a longer history. But this isn’t a letter about our history. In fact, it’s just the opposite.

It’s because we’ve been around for so long that we take it for granted that everyone understands who we are and how many people continue to rely on us. We’re so good at documenting the history of Kaua‘i and its community, we sometimes forget to remember our own story. Instead, what you may hear is that newspapers are dying. Or the Internet is eating our lunch. Or that we’re going to die.

Guess what? They said the same thing when radio entered the market. Then, there was television. And then cable. Now comes the Internet.

But the truth is the Internet has created an audience for us far bigger than anyone we could have reached with just the print product alone. Anyone who has a mobile device — a phone, a tablet or an Internet connection — can read the The Garden Island. That means we reach more people every day than we ever could with just a hard copy newspaper.

If The Garden Island is dying, it will never have had a better audience to watch its demise than today.

What we know from our Web traffic and our circulation is tomorrow the number of people who read us will probably be greater.

Look around: Most of the predictions of our death or decline come from other media sources, which have every reason to turn the spotlight on a competitor to take the focus off a fractured digital landscape that constantly sees dwindling numbers of followers.

Unfortunately, we’ve become too good at ignoring the misinformation, believing steadfastly that we don’t make the news, we cover it. We’ve also trusted that readers understood the importance of newspapers. Too often, though, we’ve remained silent and misinformation gets repeated again and again.

You know what happens when a lie is repeated again and again, right? It becomes the truth.

Well, don’t take our word for it. Take an audience report conducted in 2011 among adults in our market.

•  More than 74 percent of adults in our market have read or used the newspaper, been to our Website or done both in the past week.

•  Our reach is unparalleled. We reach an estimated 63 percent of Kaua‘i’s community that make up 18 to 69 year olds. In other words, this isn’t just your father’s newspaper. It’s probably your children’s as well.

•  When surveyed, nearly 53.1 percent of our online readers said they came to our Website to get local news — something that’s available in few — if any — other locations.

•  We are still the advertising leader as nearly 4 in 10 adults purchased something as a result of seeing a print advertisement in our market’s newspaper in the past 30 days.

We are one of the few sites that customizes and optimizes our Website for easy access if readers want to view it with a phone, tablet or reader.

We have a great audience. Nearly 188,000 unique visitors and 1.4 million page views a month to www.thegardenisland.com can’t be wrong.

We thought you might like to know that. After all, if we don’t tell our story, who will? Those guys who keep on telling you we’re dying?

Rumors of our demise haven’t just been exaggerated. They’ve been fabricated.

Sincerely,

Casey Quel Fitchett

Publisher

The Garden Island newspaper