Information Survival in a News Desert: Ways that Local News Gets Made and Spread with Mobile Technologies on Molokai

Fewer and fewer journalists are working outside of major metropolitan areas anymore, creating vast news deserts across the country, where people have grassroots-democracy needs for local news but not many trustworthy and independent sources to provide it. Vestiges of journalistic systems are in place — bulletin boards for pamphleteering, printshops, social media channels, etc. — showing signs that responsible means for public discourse could thrive again under the right circumstances. To document such contexts, this paper describes ways in which a Hawaii news desert, the semi-remote island of Molokai, fills its most-basic journalistic voids, including a bricolage of sources called “The Coconut Wireless.” In this decentralized system, supported by a powerful digital network connected via social media and smartphones, local news of certain genres, such as service journalism, still gets made and shared among all sorts of other types of information. This content appears mostly disassociated from the nation’s professional practices and standards, but it also illustrates hearty strains of journalism existing and persisting nonetheless. Using an immersive cultural analysis of this news-desert community, “The Coconut Wireless” is documented as a survivor species of sorts, one that is informal, unregulated, and unpredictable but also heavily relied upon anyway, potentially portending journalistic successors.