Pacific Islands Newspapers : Home

This guide was created by D. Keali'i MacKenzie for the purpose of introducing scholars to the corpus of Pacific Islands newspapers held in the Hawaiian and Pacific Collections of the UH-Mānoa Library. The inspiration for this guide came from scholarship surrounding Hawaiian- and Maori-language newspapers, and the ongoing push to highlight these papers as important sources of history, culture, genealogy, scientific data and more.

This guide is not a comprehensive listing of all newspapers published in (or about) the Pacific Islands region. The initial goal was to showcase a historic newspaper, a newspaper in the indigenous language, and a contemporary newspaper for each island group. This was not always possible: Some islands do not have a contemporary paper, or such a paper is not available in the Pacific Collection. Others have not yet published a newspaper in the indigenous language, though they may have one or more in colonial/administrative languages--i.e., French, English, Spanish, German and etc.

Some of the publications listed in this guide would more properly be termed bulletins, reports, newsletters or broadsides. Those that are included here are judged to be important sources of information, and may be the only available "newpaper-type" publication for a particular island group. Academic journals and/or popular press magazines are not included here, even when they are the only available periodical from a given island group. 

Comments are appreciated -- we especially welcome information on newspapers that we may not already subscribe to, as we aim to collect these publications as comprehensively as possible within the Pacific Islands region.

This guide was originally created by D. Kealiʻi MacKenzie while he was employed as a Hawaiian & Pacific Collections Librarian. It is currently maintained by Pacific Collection librarian Stu Dawrs.