Colleen Uechi

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.”