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Our
Team:

The Hawai‘i Journalism Initiative is supported by a seasoned group of journalists, media executives and long-standing members of the community, bringing together a wealth of expertise.

Colleen Uechi

Editor, Hawai‘i Journalism Initiative

Colleen Uechi is the editor of the Hawai‘i Journalism Initiative. She began her career with The Molokai Dispatch in 2014, covering news and sports and hauling weekly newspaper deliveries across the island in a dilapidated Ford Aspire. In 2015, she joined The Maui News, where one of her earliest assignments was reporting on the closure of the island’s last sugar cane plantation — a yearlong series that earned the newspaper’s staff a Society of Professional Journalists award. 

Uechi was promoted to assistant city editor in 2019 and took the helm as managing editor in 2020. She has won multiple SPJ awards for coverage of protests over construction of a solar telescope atop Haleakalā, sweeps of homeless encampments, major storms and the experiences of local veterans. Her work has also been shared in The Hawai‘i Herald and on Hawai‘i Public Radio.

Raised in Honolulu, Uechi and her cousins spent summers making homemade newspapers recounting family adventures to the beach. Years later, she helmed the student newspapers at Hawaiian Mission Academy and Pacific Union College in Angwin, Calif., where she earned dual Bachelor of Arts degrees in Intercultural Communications and Spanish. Uechi spent a year in college studying in Sagunto, Spain, and also taught English for five months in Almaty, Kazakhstan, after graduation. And while she’s technically an O‘ahu girl, Uechi agrees — “Maui nō ka ‘oi.”

Rob Collias

Reporter, Hawai‘i Journalism Initiative

Rob Collias has had a passion for journalism from the time he was a youngster growing up in Eugene, Ore., watching University of Oregon basketball and football games. Each morning he would run to the front door to grab the hometown newspaper’s sports section. 

As a junior year at Oregon, one of his first assignments for the Oregon Daily Emerald, the daily student newspaper, came in fall 1984 when the Ducks beat the two-time defending national champions from Hawai‘i in the NCAA volleyball tournament, a foreshadow of things to come for Collias.

He was the ODE sports editor for the 1985-86 school year, which vaulted him to a summer internship at the Eugene Register-Guard. In 1987, he took the chance to work at the Pacific Daily News in Guam, where he covered the 1988 Olympics in Seoul. 

After two years in Guam, Collias moved to Honolulu to work for The Honolulu Advertiser in 1989. After one year on O‘ahu, he took a sportswriting job at The Maui News where he worked for 34 years.

Collias has been honored many times for his work in journalism, including the National Sports Media Association Hawai‘i Sportswriter of the Year in 2021 and first place in column writing from the Society of Professional Journalists Hawai‘i Chapter in 2008.

Collias lives in Kihei with his wife of 34 years, Denise. They have two grown children, both born on Maui — Alex Collias is a teacher at Maui High School and Monica Collias is a teacher at ‘Iao Intermediate School.


Board of Directors

Jack Dugan

Chief Operating Officer, Pacific Media Group

Lee Imada

Former Managing Editor, The Maui News

Chuck Bergson

Director, President & CEO of Pacific Media Group, Inc.

Anthony Takitani

Partner, Takitani, Agaran, Jorgensen & Wildman, LLLP

Mike Rountree

CPA at Rountree Consulting, Inc.

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