With major Native Hawaiian issues such as the Thirty Meter Telescope on Mauna Kea looming, the Hawaii chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists has devoted its upcoming regional conference to reporting on indigenous issues.

The conference is scheduled for March 20-21 at the University of Hawaii-Manoa Campus Center. UH students get a special discount on tickets.

According to a press release, the “Real Skills for Real News” conference will feature Native American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander presentations, including a debate contest on “Major news outlets should take significant steps to change how they gather and report news that concerns Indigenous communities.”

TMT demonstrators on the summit of Mauna Kea with the Keck and Subaru telescopes in the background, April  2015. The standoff will be addressed at a journalism conference later this month.

Cory Lum/Civil Beat

There are also hands-on training sessions on Google, Facebook and Instagram, digital sleuthing on deadline, fighting “fake news” and copyright issues with photographs.

And, the Friday 10:15-11:30 a.m. session is titled “The future of news — Can the nonprofit model work?”

Civil Beat’s own vice president of operations and philanthropy, Ben Nishimoto, will join Steve Petranik of Hawaii Business magazine and Bill Dorman of Hawai‘i Public Radio to talk shop.

In addition to Hawaii, the regional conference covers the SPJ chapters in Arizona, California, Guam, Nevada and the Mariana Islands.

Interested in attending? Click here for more information.