For more than 27 years, I have held jobs in government and business in Honolulu that included responding to inquiries from the news media. Tom Wolfe once described these noble duties as flak-catching. To wrap up the metaphor, I have recently hung up my flak jacket and retired.

I hope I've earned the right to reflect briefly on the operations of the news media in Honolulu and offer broad suggestions about the future.

When newly elected Lt. Gov. Jean King asked me to join her staff in 1978 to help with the press and other duties, my approach was that good policy and clear communications made for good public relations. And as a child of the '60s, I believed that the sine qua non of a democracy was a free press.

Despite experiencing three decades of an imperfect press and my resorting periodically to tricks of the trade that are absent in any civics handbook, I hang up my jacket knowing those two principles are as true as ever.

From the standpoint of where people got their news, the two Honolulu dailies were king 27 years ago. There were two fewer TV stations, and not every station had daily, evening news reports. Technology limited TV live reporting to studios.

Only two radio stations were viable news sources, KSSK and KHVH.

And so the morning Honolulu Advertiser and the evening Star-Bulletin were the pace-setters. George Chaplin of The Advertiser was an activist editor who, amidst occasional controversy, was an agenda-setter.

Today, TV is the main source of news for most people. Technology, advertising and marketing, and the devolvement of a reading audience fostered this reversal. Local TV news has grown so that every station has two evening broadcasts, as well as late night news. And not surprisingly in a town that rises early, TV morning news is a popular source of information.

At the same time, technology allows TV to shoot live from almost any scene. The availability of this technology races on a hedonic treadmill to get us all to the crime, the car crash or the house fire because it's fast, it's visual and, by golly, because we can do it.

Nanosecond news.

And there's the rub. In determining what gets covered, has TV gizmology trumped reasonable judgment about news value? Along the way, are we losing TV field reporters with experience in covering government, business, community and culture to an abundance of journalistic expertise on the road crisis du jour?

Don't get me wrong. There are lots of individual examples of good work by local TV reporters. Channel 4 reporters know their government beat. Channel 9 has made noticeable and beneficial improvements to its news package. And I like Channel 8's pitch for communities to suggest news stories.

But you be the judge. What are the trends? Is it entertainment based on the lowest common denominator or is it spirited public education?

Looking at newspaper coverage over the years, the once collegial relationship between the two dailies changed markedly with the end of the joint operating agreement. In the days of friendly competition, you would walk up the stairs to the second floor of the Hawaii Newspaper Agency building and fittingly turn right to talk to the more conservative Star Bulletin editorial board and left to go the more liberal Advertiser.

But greater than today's battle between the dailies is their struggle to maintain and increase readership in the face of the popularity of TV news.

One pleasant surprise is that today, the dailies appear to be running more in-depth stories on a wide range of local issues than in the recent past. There are talented beat reporters for education, Hawaiian issues, government, environment and business. Their stories are thorough and diverse.

At the same time, the dailies must develop ways to deal with more segmented audiences. The newspapers produce updated electronic editions, and some of their best reporters are now blogging. For print media nationally, the prognosis is that individual readers will increasingly be able to determine the subject matter of the news they receive, its political slant and the mode in which they receive it.

At first blush, this may not sound so bad. But how much customer focus is too much? What happens if each of us tailors our own news through say, a telecom carrier? Does this signal the end of the local paper we all read as a common source? Does it displace the local newspaper which is so important to us because if offers a broad range of news adhering to tried-and-true journalistic standards?

If the print media become merely a source for tailored information and TV increasingly opts for nanosecond news, will we have the information we need as a community to interact effectively with each other? Will we understand varying viewpoints sufficiently to solve the tough problems we face, not in chat rooms but in the real world?

There are hard choices ahead for Hawai'i's news media as they balance the economic need to build audience share and readership versus the social contract to protect the integrity and better the quality of Hawai'i's free press, based on the principle that it is an essential cornerstone of freedom.

Chuck Freedman was communications chief for former Gov. John Waihee and vice president of corporate relations for Hawaiian Electric Co. He wrote this commentary for The Advertiser.