About Maui Time Weekly

Maui Time Weekly

Maui Time Weekly was a free alternative weekly newspaper for Maui County, Hawaii, founded in 1997 in Wailuku by Tommy Russo and Mark D'Antonio. Both founders came from Chico, California, and had formerly played in the band Sunset Red. The paper began as a biweekly newsprint magazine, grew into a weekly under publisher Tommy Russo, and was admitted to the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies in 2004. Its circulation reached 18,000, and its regular features included LC Watch, a standing scrutiny of the Maui County Department of Liquor Control, and Coconut Wireless, its community news and gossip column. It paused publication and laid off all its staff in June 2020 during the collapse of tourism under COVID-19, then was relaunched on 16 September 2021 under the name MauiTimes by 6035 Media, with J. Sam Weiss as publisher and executive editor and a planned circulation of over 78,000.

Maui Time's story compresses the whole modern history of the American alternative weekly into one island paper: founded by two musicians from California with no newspaper background, built into its county's leading alternative voice, recognized by the national association of its peers, destroyed in a season by an economic shutdown that struck its tourism-dependent island with special force, and revived under new ownership within fifteen months. Its best-known feature, a weekly watch on the county liquor department, exemplifies the form's ideal of persistent, specific scrutiny of local power.

Two Musicians From Chico Found a Paper

Tommy Russo and Mark D'Antonio arrived in the newspaper business from a band. The two founders, from Chico, California, had played in Sunset Red before settling on Maui and, in 1997, starting a publication in Wailuku, the county seat. The alternative weekly tradition in America runs on such entrances: outsiders who see that a place's official news leaves its real life uncovered, and who learn publishing by publishing. Maui in 1997 had a daily newspaper and a visitor industry press, but no alternative weekly in the mainland sense, no paper dedicated to the island's music, surf, counterculture and political argument for the people who lived there year-round.

The paper began as a biweekly newsprint magazine rather than a conventional newspaper, a format that suited its founders' instincts and resources: magazine pacing, weekly ambition. Under Russo as publisher it grew into a true weekly, Maui Time Weekly, and established the distribution across Maui County, racks and outlets in Wailuku, Kahului, Lahaina, Kihei and the island's other communities, by which a free paper reaches an island's scattered population. D'Antonio's co-founding role and Russo's continuing publishership gave the young paper both its creative start and its long-term management.

An Alternative Weekly on an Island

The alternative weekly form, perfected in mainland cities, translates distinctively to an island county. Maui's population is small, its politics are county-wide and personal, its economy rests on tourism, and its resident community lives in permanent tension and interdependence with the visitor industry that employs it. A free alternative weekly could say what that arrangement felt like from inside: covering county government, land development, water, beaches and the environment alongside music, restaurants, surf and nightlife, in a voice that assumed readers lived there rather than vacationed there. Maui Time built its identity on that resident's-eye view, and its 18,000 circulation in a county of Maui's size represented a substantial share of the island's households.

Admission to the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies in 2004 certified that the island experiment had met the national standard of its genre. The association, the trade body of America's alternative papers, admitted members by peer review of editorial quality and business practice. For a paper founded seven years earlier by two former bandmates, membership placed Maui Time in the company of the mainland's established alternative institutions and connected its staff to the national network through which alternative journalism shared reporting, advertising and professional standards.

LC Watch and the Scrutiny of County Power

The paper's signature feature was LC Watch, its regular scrutiny of the Maui County Department of Liquor Control. On Maui, liquor licensing touches every bar, restaurant, hotel and entertainment venue on the island, so the department's rules, enforcement and adjudications shape the nightlife and hospitality economy that residents and visitors share. A standing column watching that single agency, week after week, is alternative journalism at its most characteristic: not episodic outrage but permanent attention, the kind that makes officials aware that an observer will attend the obscure meeting, read the enforcement report and print what happened.

LC Watch also expressed the paper's politics of scale. A free weekly cannot out-report a metropolitan daily on world news, but it can out-watch a county department indefinitely, and on an island, that watching matters to readers whose livelihoods the department licenses. The feature became one of the paper's defining elements in reference accounts of it, alongside Coconut Wireless, a title drawn from Hawaii's idiom for the informal network by which island news travels, formalized in the paper as its community column. Between the watchdog and the wireless, scrutiny and gossip, Maui Time mapped the two channels through which an island actually learns about itself.

Coconut Wireless and Island Culture

Coconut Wireless, the paper's regular feature named for the Pacific's traditional word-of-mouth network, carried the community intelligence that bound Maui Time's readership: local happenings, music, personalities and the talk of the island, presented with the knowing tone of an insider's bulletin. In alternative weekly terms it was the paper's front-of-book and community column combined, but its name declared a specifically Hawaiian understanding that news on an island has always travelled person to person, and that a newspaper succeeds by joining that network rather than standing above it.

The paper's broader cultural coverage, music listings, arts, dining and the island's outdoor life, served the same joining function. Maui's resident culture, surfers, musicians, chefs, activists and multi-generation local families alongside mainland transplants like its own founders, rarely saw itself centred in the visitor-oriented publications that dominate Hawaii's newsstands. Maui Time centred it. That editorial stance, more than any single story, explains the loyalty that kept a free paper viable on the island for twenty-three years and made its disappearance in 2020 a community loss rather than a business footnote.

The COVID Shutdown of June 2020

In June 2020 Maui Time paused publication and laid off all of its staff. The cause was the collapse of tourism under COVID-19, which struck Hawaii's economy with a completeness few places matched: visitor arrivals fell to near zero under quarantine rules, the hotels, restaurants and entertainment venues that advertised in a free weekly closed or emptied, and the racks through which the paper distributed stood in shuttered businesses. A free paper has no subscription revenue to fall back on; when its advertisers close, it closes. The June 2020 pause made Maui Time one of the alternative press's clearest COVID casualties, a paper not defeated by readers' choices but by the shutdown of its island's entire visitor economy.

The pause ended a twenty-three-year continuous run from the 1997 founding. Editor and Publisher, which had covered the paper since its early years, documented the suspension as part of the pandemic's toll on alternative weeklies nationally, papers that entered 2020 already pressured by digital advertising and then lost their local entertainment and hospitality advertisers at once. On Maui the effect was magnified by insularity: there was no neighbouring market to sustain distribution, and no tourism, no paper, was a nearly literal equation.

Relaunch as MauiTimes in 2021

The paper returned on 16 September 2021, relaunched as MauiTimes under 6035 Media, with J. Sam Weiss as publisher and executive editor. The relaunch account in Editor and Publisher recorded the new operation's ambition: a planned circulation of over 78,000, a figure far above the old paper's 18,000, reflecting a relaunch conceived at county scale and, presumably, for a recovering visitor market as well as residents. The new name adjusted the brand, Maui Time becoming MauiTimes, while preserving its recognition, a common technique for reviving a suspended title under new ownership with fresh capital and expanded plans.

The revival testified to the value the original paper had created. A suspended free weekly's assets are its name, its distribution relationships and its place in readers' habits, and on Maui those assets were worth acquiring and relaunching within fifteen months of the shutdown. Tommy Russo and Mark D'Antonio's 1997 creation thus outlasted its own corporate death, passing, like many alternative papers before it, from founders to successors while the island readership it had assembled persisted through the transition.

The Alternative Weekly Tradition in Hawaii

Maui Time's history also documents the reach of the alternative weekly movement, which by the 1990s had produced member papers in nearly every American metropolitan area and, in this case, in an island county of Hawaii. Its admission to the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies in 2004 connected Maui to that national movement formally, and its features and fate matched the movement's pattern everywhere: independent ownership, free distribution, cultural coverage as a core mission, watchdog attention to unglamorous local agencies, vulnerability to advertising shocks and, increasingly, revival or survival under new local ownership after crisis.

Within Hawaii, the paper occupied the alternative niche for Maui County as other alternative publications did for Honolulu, giving the neighbour island a press voice distinct from both the state's metropolitan daily tradition and Maui's own daily. County government in Wailuku, land and water politics, and the island's cultural life were covered from a resident, sceptical standpoint that the visitor press had no reason to adopt and the daily could not always match in tone. That niche, once demonstrated from 1997 onward, became a permanent expectation of Maui public life.

Legacy of Maui Time Weekly

As Maui Time Weekly, the paper's legacy is the twenty-three years in which Maui County had an alternative voice of its own: founded by two musicians from Chico in 1997, grown from a biweekly magazine into the county's free weekly, nationally recognized in 2004, read across the island for LC Watch's scrutiny of the liquor department and Coconut Wireless's community intelligence, and silenced only by a pandemic that stopped the island's economy itself. Its circulation of 18,000 in a small island county, its association membership and its features' fame in reference accounts all measure an influence beyond its size.

The 2021 relaunch as MauiTimes under 6035 Media and J. Sam Weiss extends that legacy into a second life, with ambitions larger than the original's. Whether under its founding publishers or its successors, the institution Russo and D'Antonio started remains the clearest example in Hawaii of the alternative weekly idea transplanted to island soil, a free paper that watched county power, celebrated resident culture and told Maui, in its own idiom, what the coconut wireless was saying.