Honolulu Star-Bulletin from Honolulu, Hawaii • 71

The TV Mors Roce began to make a dramatic difference in the ratings and generally went to beefing up the news programs with better, more extensive reporting. More newscasts were scheduled on weekends, and brief, new morning local-news shows began. During the same period, both KHON and KITV invested massively in technology, each spending more than $1 million for new equipment that helped deliver higher quality newscasts. Earlier this year, KITV engaged Mainland consultants for advice about the format of their newscasts. The results have been very visible to viewers with a new set for the show that features a sophisticated electronic wedding of taped footage with live newscasters.

new money went into diversification in five major divisions: the station itself, Hawaii Production Center (creating ads), Lee Productions (creating programs), Lee Concerts (co-sponsoring live performances and events) and Lee Color i photo processing). At KITV, the emphasis with the new money was on news. More than $1 million was spent refurbishing the station physically to make it a pleasant place to work. New faces greeted viewers of the news on KHON and KITV in the form of Mainland anchormen imported with much ballyhoo. The former brought in Paul Udell, with a sculpted face that made him look like Jack Lord's brother.

The latter brought in Jack Hawkins, who a number of viewers found unsettlingly like Ted Baxter, the lampoon of a TV newscaster on the old "Mary Tyler Moore Show." Neither Udell nor Hawkins had a number-one spot at 6 o'clock and neck-and-neck competition at 10 o'clock in both cases with KHON. A direct comparison with KITV is impossible because its evening newscasts are scheduled at and 9:30, when the competition is broadcasting Mainland network news at the earlier time slot and entertainment programs at the later hour. To Rockwell, the identity blur among the three stations is the result of something resembling a full-on television conundrum in Hawaii: Imported anchors (witness Udell and Hawkins) don't have full credibility with viewers; the faces with credibilty are (he ones like Tindali and Moore that have been on local TV news for 10 or 15 vears. and those faces have been on KGMB. In addition to new anchormen, both KITV and KHON began fattening news budgets.

At KITV, increases have been I All of this eventually turned Honolulu television news into an authentically competitive game. At KGMB. it was finally clear that the By Pierre Bowman Stur-Budi'tin Writer THE phone rang at the Star-Bulletin and the caller asked not particularly discreetly whether Bob Jones. KGMB-TV's perennial news anchor, had died. She hadn't been see-; ing him on the 10 o'clock news.

Bob Jones has not died. He is alive and well and on KGMB-TV news at 6 and 10 on weekends. Bob Sevey, KGMB's nearest answer to Walter Cronkite, is still doing the week-night news at 6 and is now in Jones' old 10 p.m. spot as well. Sevey had worn two hats as news anchor and the station's news director and gave up the latter in the latest shuffle.

The station announced yesterday that Brian Peterson will be imported from Wisconsin as the new news director and ill probably begin work at the end of the month. The moves for Jones and Sevey are merely the latest in an apparently endless shuffle of personalities among Honolulu's three network-affiliated I television stations. Is this merely moving the deck chairs around on the Titanic? Not quite. Think more in terms of deck chairs moving among the Constitution and the Independence and I another cruise ship catering to a slightly more budget-conscious crowd. Television news is fairly big business, with the three Honolulu network- affiliated stations collectively spending something like $4 million on their operations this year and presumably generating a like amount of income.

The latest moves were inspired by the Frank Magid Organization, a major, national consulting firm based in Iowa that conducts studies and then delivers advice about television news. KGMB hired the Magid Organization, which conducted a survey of KGMB viewers in the late summer. There wasn't a solid wave of spontaneous applause at the station to greet Magid. "I was the reluctant dragon in terms of hiring the Magid Organization," says Sevey. "Consultants don't generally rate high on news director's lists of people we prefer.

They're well respected and tjften feared. In other markets they've awesome things like 'Fire the news director! Fire the anchors! Change the There's a bogeyman perception of Magid to many people in my line." Hiring a high-rolling outfit like Magid I was unprecedented among Honolulu TV stations but KGMB had plenty of reason for its decision. Some eight years ago. KGMB was king of Island TV news. The ratings rolled in, over and over, giving the station 60, i 70, percent of viewers.

The news departments at KHON (Channel 2) and KITV (Channel 4) were also-rans. I "Most of the viewers who watched news watched Channel 9," says KGMB i general manager Richard A. Weiner. "At 1 that point, we had more people i watching KGMB news than KITV and KHON combined." ti Over the years. KGMB's huge 'dominance with the ratings eroded for a number of reasons.

Each of the network-affiliate stations had a change of ownership. KGMB became part of Lee Enterprises, a i Mainland conglomerate that owns 18 newspapers and four television stations. KHON was bought by the Dos Moines Register. And KITV was purchased by the Shamrock Organization. Roy Disney's iWalt's brother) company in Los Angeles (and unaffiliated with Disney i With new owners, each station had an increased flow of money for operations, "especially in the case of KGMB and KHON.

1 At KGMB, where news was fat, the Sevey is relieved to be free of the administrative aspects of being news director. "I've been sort of like a bear with a thorn in his paw." he says, "frustrated wearing those two hats." Sevey says that in his personal life, he and his wife a woman with a distinctively salty personality seem to be adjusting to his new schedule and are learning how to sleep later in the mornings. Sevey also renegotiated his contract. General manager Weiner says that Sevey is now hands down the'highest-paid television news person in Hawaii. Jones says the change "happened to coincide with my request to get off at night." He notes, a trifle ruefuly.

that he'd hoped to get a crack at the (i o'clock weekday news and then "go home and have a semblance of normal life" with his wife and their 10-year-old daughter. Under the present plan, he gets to go home and a half a loaf is better than none Jones is in the process of renegotiating his contract. "This is not going to hurt my paycheck at all," he says "That's one of the things that makes it bearable." KGMB, KITV and KHON are competing in news as they never have before. There's a realization that the television market is growing more and more complex. There's the certainty that independent stations like KIKU and the fledgling KSHO and public television's KHET.

as well as the cable-TV services, all are taking pieces of the viewer audience. At each station, there a kind of consensus that the atmosphere of competition is very healthy. But there is also emphasis on being best. KITV's Rockwell says his station is providing an alternative newscast. Wally Zunmermann.

news director at KHOY says his station is aiming to be tops. KGMB's Weiner says the same thing. All three stations are also loc ked in a battle of technolgy. Each has spent millions in recent years converting from film to tape. The latest in technological one-upsmanship is mobile news units that can broadcast news live, where it's happening.

KHON was first with one of these new units, which cost between S70 0i and $90,000. and calls it SCOOP KGMB has bought one and it's on its way to Honolulu. KITV is shopping. can work himself into a series of sighs about the new units, noting that there are tremendous difficulties in transmitting from them due to Honolulu high-rises and the topography of the Island. He also notes that it can be tempting to use them as "bells and whistles'' rather than a tool for gathering legitimate news For his part.

Jones can work up bis own sardonic sighs over having an irganization like Magid create the shape of a news operation. "Their view of the world," he says, "is pretts much based on getting ratings, of giving people the news they think they should get rather than the news we think they should get. We all know most people don give a about city council meetings, that the don't care about legislative "So let's follow more ambulances and fire engines, lets have les about the legislature and more about where to get a cheap earwash. Let's tell them where they can get today's best price on avocados." won't be surprised if there are more changes at KGMB with the arrival of the new news director. "Then we'll know a helluva lot he says, "and probably which of us will still work here." More deck chairs to rearrange? an annual 20 percent for the last few vears, to a present annual budget of some $900,000.

At KHON. the current annual budget has been beefed up to some $1.2 million. The extra dollars, especially at KHON. Star-Bulletin Today I nU'rtamment lasting salubrious effect on ratings. The former returned to the Mainland and the latter is reading news to a tiny audience on KSHO.

the VHF channel that looks as if it broadcasts out of the back of a truck. With the departure of Udell and Hawkins, the deckchair shuffling began. KHON raided KGMB and elevated all-American boy sportscaster Joe Moore to anchorman. KITV raided KGMB, too, making second-banana Tim Tindali its co-anchor. To many viewers, the net effect of the shuffling has partly been a blurring of the differences between the stations.

"The public perception is at a very high level of non-discriminators." explains Don Roc kwell, news director at KITV. "It jst doesn't matter to people. If you look in the rating books, you see them (the viewers) swing all over the place." What Rockwell is saying may be next to heresy in the television industry. According to his reading of TV research, a lot of people in Hawaii simply don't care what they're watching when it conies to news. If the audience is swinging, it has been away from KGMB.

This year, the once-unchallenged dominance of its news operation had eroded to a sometimes marginal station could not simply keep doing business as usual and hope to retain its I high ratines. The popular Linda Coble. who had left the station to work in Oregon, was brought back into the fold. Her presence on the 10 o'clock news helped nudge the ratings upward, but not as steeply as the station had hoped. KGMB.

which had invested as massively in new equipment as its competitors, took a fresh look at its budget and reorganized the way the money was distributed among its 1 divisions. The news budget got a hefty boost and i now nearlv twice that of KITV Then came the Magid Organization Sevov's worst fears of the bogeyman wcren realized. Magid determined that he was the station's strongest anchor and that the way to attract better i ratings was to cut with the leading edge. Magid also determined that Jones was the station's second-strongest i anchor. Therelore.

Sevey was assigned to both the evening weekday news shows. Jones i was moved to weekends and acts as executive producer for news on three 1 weekdays. The moves, KGMB and Magid presume, will have a salubrious effect on ratings. i Both Sevey and Jones are reasonably i pleased with the new arrangement. Honolulu Wednesday, November 9, 1983 I Creating Landscapes in a Vase WW By Rosanna Hall Star-Bulletin U'rtfer HER hand presses closed on metal clippers and the base of a leafy tree branch splits.

Michie Sakamoto, master of ikebana, places the branches into a metal frog especially designed for arranging flowers, as her students look on without saying a word. Soon the bouquet takes shape as leaves and flowers seem to live again in the classroom-turned-garden. But Sakamoto is not satisfied. She's a perfectionist, pulling off leaves from an abundantly thick bouquet. Sakamoto is one of the most popular ikebana, or Japanese flower-arrangjng, teachers in Honolulu.

She has taught continuously for 30 years. "Monkey fall from tree; even I can make a mistake," says the 06-year-old teacher, who has been a student and teacher of ikenobo ikebana for 50 years. "When flowers face up, they look alive." Sakamoto tells her students at Moilili Community Center. "On the other hand, when nature's abundance looks down, they look sad." Sakamoto moves slowly from one flower arrangement to the next, straightening a branch or rearranging the flowers. She looks at an arrangement without registering any reaction on her face of soft rounded features framed by short gray hair.

She speaks in a quiet voice to a student. Other students stand In reverent silence as she talks. Sakamoto began studying ikebana as her lifetime work by accident. As a teen-ager studying at McCully Japanese language school in 1933, she was advised by her teachers to go to Japan and learn the arts and crafts, embroidery, the sewing of kimo-uos and ikebana. "Then they asked me to come back and teach," Sakamoto recalls.

She stayed with the family of the McCully School principal in Kyoto two years where, by chance, she lived next to an ikenobo teacher. She returned to Honolulu to teach. "Of course, you have to study for years and years. So I returned to Japan three times i. HI' St 7 arrangements at Kahala Mall from 10 a.m.

to 9 p.m. Saturday and 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday. Ikebana means "to let cut flowers live in your container again." Sakamoto" says, during one of her weekly classes.

"Arrange them in such a way that flowers look very alive. "My favorite arrangement is shoka. very simple style. 1 tell my students, don expect to get everything in 10 easy lessons." Instead, it takes at least three years. All of these styles, she said, originated at the "ikenobo school in the ancient Rokkakudo Temple in Kyoto in 587 AD.

While Buddhist temple floral offerings began in China, the art of flower-arranging was perfected in Japan much later, in the loth century. By that time strict styles were followed and the temple school was recognized as an ikebana school. "My teacher in ikebana said you "should arrange with your feet, not only with your hands. By that it means, go and look how the flowers grow. You have to 90 and see.

use your feet to go and see "Do you know where the flower comes out in Bird of Paradise?" Sakamoto asks. "It comes up from outside the leaves:" That is how to arrange Birds of Paradise, according to the shoka style. Shoka also requires placement of plants according to their rela tive height in nature. For example, arrange branches of the willow highland the chrysanthemum low. "Also arrange shoka according to the season.

The Japanese iris leaves in winter are tall but flower stems are short. But ih summer, flowers are taller than the leaves." Shoka remained in vogue along with the rikka and naseire styles until Japan's traditional lifestyle was changed in the mid-1800s. after Commodore Matthew Perry sailed into Japan. Ikebana adapted to the introduction of western flowers, and chairs and tables in the Japanese home. The stylized formal and infor mal arrangements prevailed until alter World War 11 when a "free style" was introduced.

Because flowers were scarce after the war, florists used dry leaves and branches and even broken pieces of metal to compose an arrang-ment. They were based on expressions of the arranger's feeling. mouthed, shallow container. Depth is important, Sakamoto explains to Florence Higuchi, who is studying that style. Meanwhile, Margaret lizaki styles her flowers in the ancient 15th-century rikka form which uses a variety of different materials but does not emphasize the individual beauty of any particular material.

The arrangement creates moods of the seasons by use of space between the plants." Sakamoto and her students are preparing for a show that will celebrate her 50 years as student of the ikenobo school. She has attained the highest degree as master professor, or sokatoku. She has helped more than 1,000 students straighten, curve or lean flowers, branches and leaves into traditional Japanese styles. To mark her anniversary, her students will exhibit flower ranging, although her daughter, who lives in Japan, studied ikebana for a while. Sakamoto previously taught flower-arranging at several military bases and arranged bouquets at the Ala Moana Americana Hotel.

Ala Moana Center mall and Honolulu city hall. She also helped organize Hawaii chapters of the Ikebana International and Ikenobo Ikebana Society. When she is not teaching, Sakamoto has found other creative outlets, including batik and calligraphy. "For my home. 1 do a flower arrangement once a week.

But I don't try to grow any special flowers. In her weekly classes, Sakamoto teaches many styles including moribana which is the simplest style of ikebana. Plant materials are usually composed in a wide- Michie Sakamoto gives Doris Tomoeda some pointers. Star-Bulletin photo by Dennis Oda. At right, two of Sakamoto's arrangements.

before World War II," she said. Then Sakamoto retired from teaching for several years to be married and to raise three sons and a daughter. "My husband was the one who encouraged me to return to ikebana." she says. "One time in 1955. I went to Japan again to study.

I took my 4-year-old son and my husband stayed back and took care of the other three children for three months. Otherwise, I couldn't have resumed my studies." Sakamoto has been widowed 20 years and her grown children are not interested in flower-ar.