Either way, we’re going back and at least doing the 5 hour tour, as we want to see a lot of the locations on the ranch that we didn’t get to see.

I have worked for myself in my own business, private industry for others, local government, and academia. These salaries are not high, and probably for Hawaii, pretty low.

So my question again is: what is the big deal knowing them?

When we talk about a free press, weʻre not talking about money. Iʻm not quite sure how the two concepts became so conflated, but it strikes me as quite dangerous that they have.

The internet does not mean the end of the economy. Work still requires resources to produce. Including journalism.

The argument about public data behind a paywall is compelling enough, as long as one assumes that news produces itself for free and has always been free to consumers. But it doesnʻt, and more importantly, it hasnʻt.

If the Advertiser had acquired these documents in 1990, we would not be having this conversation. It would have cost you $.50 to read a copy of the paper that contained the information. That is to say, behind a paywall. And no, you would not have been able to export that information with the click of a mouse to use for your own purposes. You would have had to write it down, or pay a few cents to photocopy it. A small price to pay.

News became available for free on the web for a while, just like music before it. That does not mean that news became free to produce. It still costs money to have a people in our community whose full-time jobs are to perform the watchdog role that our Constitutions envisions for the press.

There is a lot of resentment out there toward reporters, including a lot of it here in this thread. I find that sad and disturbing.

With all due respect to Ryan, heʻs been around a lot longer than Civil Beat. He could have submitted these FOIA requests at anytime through the years. But he didnʻt. He, like the overwhelming majority of bloggers, is following the lead of the professionals. Thereʻs a reason for that. Professionals do a better job most of the time at most tasks in most fields.

Someone always pays. If there is something wrong with that, then thereʻs something wrong with the basic economic principle of work. More likely, there is something wrong with the way people view the economics of quality journalism.

Journalists are beginning to talk back on this point, and itʻs long overdue.

I always thought it strange that Capcom chose Hawaii to announce some choice titles earlier this year.

Contrary to your first comment, the .pdf is not available for free. The document is not available in any format other than a screenshot image. In analyzing access, you don’t look to how your employer uploaded it, but the characteristics associated with access. In this case, it is a qualitative slight improvement to having someone take a high resolution picture of someone holding it in their hand for the camera. The raw data was not made available but a screen shot of the raw data. (And there is a difference between those things.) It is your conflating the two that I think offends the sensibilities of even those that might otherwise support your employer’s business model.

Having you and Adrienne participate is great, but it’s something very much like revealing the data under discussion partly but not fully. You say you can’t speak for CB. So where is CB? Is it against the business model to converse on another website? That’s not the Hawaii way, anyway. Speaking to CB through you both like this is something like wearing rubber gloves as I type.

I have no personal interest in the data. There’s a thing in Hawaii which it could feed about tearing down anyone who makes even a fair shadow of what might be a decent wage when compared to the Mainland. Still, it is public information and could be valuable in many ways. Were it available as data, that is.

While you laud Civil Beat’s investment in obtaining public data, that would be valuable to us if CB were indeed a journalistic effort. Just having an editor at the helm of a business doesn’t define it as journalism. Other factors come into play. Perhaps I can’t name them all, but I suggest that being read by the public is a big part of it. There are other experiments around the country that succeed while being available to their community.

The protection and limitation of access to the government data does not turn CB into a Wikileaks. What is often muddied in discussions of CB is the fact that it is a closed group. It’s somewhat like one of those investment newsletters where for $1000 a year you get reports and the ability to question the authors. I used to subscribe to one of those in a previous (pre-Internet) life. The way this matter is being handled is very closed-group, including CB’s absence from the conversation except through surrogates.

Ryan proposes to release the same data to everyone. Now, that’s journalism, even if he doesn’t make a living from it. Many Hawaii bloggers habitually provide links to source data. Even the newspaper sites began to do that, to a limited extent.

CB has choices. I don’t know the relative importance of this set of data in the scheme of things. but CB could simply release the source file, as others would do. Perhaps scholars and mainstream journalists on our TV stations or newspapers, not to mention the blogs, would thank them for their public service and be able to sit down with the data or have their news analysts review it. It would cost CB nothing, and instead of the criticism CB is getting among potential customers, it might have generated some goodwill and even new business.

CB makes its own choices and I don’t object to a business conducting itself as it must in order to make a profit.

CB could similarly be in the spotlight if it does the same with other data sets in the future, especially if something really valuable is tantalizingly cloaked as this is.

I just went over there to check on the UH salary data. Like those mailers that tell me I’ll read about the “10 most dangerous over-the-counter drugs” if I subscribe to a health mag, the article ended, “Here’s the list: Member content.” and then the blue box, “Get All-Day Access to All Posts $1.49.”

As to the Slideshare salary display, to say CB is making that available to the public is a joke. There are 334 pages to scroll through, hard to read even full-screen and partly obscured by the watermark. CB is releasing very little by posting that image. It probably pisses off more people than find it valuable, not to mention the employees whose salaries are now revealed so that CB can make money off of the data. Below the image is a clear demand for money in exchange for access.

For a mere buck and a half a state employee can now find out what the boss and co-workers make.

To have research value, the list, with or without the names, should be made available as Ryan and ninja are doing.

Hint.