Meghan Lopez and Casey Chin, with editorial adviser Jay Hartwell, appear on "Fox and Friends" in New York City to receive their winnings: $10,000 for the two teammates and $10,000 for the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa. At left is John Malken, Fox vice president of affiliate marketing and local ad sales with the show's co-host Gretchen Carlson. Photo courtesy Jay Hartwell

College journalists awarded
for Akaka Bill video

By Lisa Asato / Ka Wai Ola Loa

Two University of Hawai'i at Mānoa journalism students who had never heard of the Akaka Bill before attending school here won national recognition for their video on the federal bill – and gained a deeper appreciation of Hawai'i history along the way.

Coming from the U.S. continent, Casey Chin and Meghan Lopez became aware of Hawaiian issues like sovereignty, the overthrow of the Hawaiian kingdom and annexation as students at the Mānoa campus. That awareness offered some understanding of Hawaiian history, but questions remained.

So they took the tools of their chosen field – broadcast journalism – and turned their curiosity and camera on people on various sides of the issue, conducting 15 in-depth interviews from Hawai'i to South Dakota – and amassing more than 13 hours of footage.

The result is a three-minute video that includes scenes from the Kū I ka Pono march and rally through Waikīkī, O'ahu in January. "Native Hawaiians are still struggling for land, language and cultural identity 50 years after statehood," the voice-over goes. "America's first Hawai'i-born president (Barack Obama) may finally end this dispute with a bill that could rewrite politics for the 50th state and its relationship with the U.S."

The pair's video on the Akaka Bill – which would make possible federal recognition of Native Hawaiians similar to the status of Native Americans – beat out about 36 other schools in the sixth annual Fox News Channel's College Challenge. Chin and Lopez split the $10,000 prize and directed that the additional $10,000 that they won for UH be split between the journalism program and Ka Leo, the student newspaper for which they both served as desk editors.

Meghan Lopez and Casey Chin with editorial adviser Jay Hartwell outside the office of Ka Leo, the student-run newspaper of the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa, where Lopez and Chin spent hours editing the winning video. Photo: Lisa Asato

"I think this piece of legislation and what it's trying to address is in a sense part of what makes Hawai'i so special and unique in the United States," said Chin, who's from Sacramento. The 23-year-old said the project gave him a "much better understanding" of "what has happened to the Native Hawaiian people" than he would have gotten otherwise.

"I really think it has made me overall aware of issues – I don't know if they're right or wrong – but issues that affect much of the residents here whether they're for the bill or against it; people have very strong opinions," he said.

Chin and Lopez borrowed camera equipment from the journalism program and used Ka Leo's editing room for post-production, in all spending five months researching, writing, interviewing and editing.

"It was more than anything I've ever done in my whole life for a news package," said Lopez, a Colorado native. "Usually for broadcast journalism you just scratch the surface."

With the help of a $1,000 travel grant from the UH School of Communications, they traveled to Maui and South Dakota for interviews. In South Dakota, the students interviewed members of the Lakota nation, including the president of the National Indian Education Association for a native perspective. The footage didn't make the final cut, but "it was definitely interesting getting out there and… relating two very long, storied histories to each other," Lopez said. "It was a great experience even if it didn't make it (into the video)."

Ka Leo editorial adviser Jay Hartwell was among those who helped the students with their mostly self-led project. His advice to take ownership of the story and "tell it how you want it to be told," was the best advice they got, Lopez said.

Hartwell called their achievement "a major accomplishment."

"These guys using a borrowed camera and a borrowed editing bay basically with their own time put this thing together without that much support other than encouragement," said Hartwell, who accompanied the two to New York City for the April 24 award ceremony and an appearance on Fox News Channel's morning show "Fox and Friends."

"They beat out all these other schools with much more developed programs and infrastructure and told a very complicated story in a manner that met the requirements for the challenge and also effectively summarized what the issues were, as much as you can summarize in three minutes," Hartwell said.

Lopez said the project gave her a greater appreciation of Hawai'i's host culture and taught her the skills of how to whittle down an abundance of information into an effective story.

"I was really satisfied with how it turned out," she said. "Because although it doesn't go into depth with the issues, at least it's comprehensive enough to spark an interest in the viewers to get them to look into the issues further and to make their own opinion."

Both Chin and Lopez will graduate from UH on May 16. Lopez will head to Germany for a two-and-a-half-week journalism fellowship and then do her own research project on Turkish migrant workers in Germany who were affected by factory closures. Chin plans to return to Sacramento to find work and aims to do in-depth pieces as a traveling investigative video journalist.