Thriving on grit and passion

Jim Kelly of the Pacific Business News writes Friday about the paper’s founder and former editor, George Mason, who died earlier this week at 84.

Kelly wrote, “In 1971, PBN sued the state of Hawaii to collect 94 cents interest on a bill for an advertisement that the state was nearly five months late in paying. The lawsuit got big play and Mason said he was just trying to get the state to follow the law that required payments to vendors within 60 days or required that interest be paid.

“Annoyed when he placed phone calls and was asked by some executive’s secretary, ‘Who’s calling?’ he conducted his own survey on the phone manners of Hawaii’s top companies and pronounced them lousy.

“He delighted in coverage that tweaked the daily newspapers and loved it when his broadsides drew outraged replies. Politicians and labor leaders were regular targets, with a broad variety labeled ‘the worst ever’ by Mason, only to be replaced by a new crop of ‘worst evers’ after the next election or job action.

“Paul Addison, a PBN editor in the 1980s who now works for Bloomberg in London, called Mason ‘a no-nonsense publisher.’

“‘He treated all his staff extremely well and imbued respect and loyalty,’ he said. ‘He never interfered with editorial decisions and encouraged our journalists to get as many scoops as possible. George was especially proud of the ads we ran showing how we scooped [the Honolulu dailies] with major business stories.'”

Read more here.