Tonga’s newest paper

A motley crew of former missionar ies and school leavers are pun

ching computer keyboards in

Tonga to produce the country’s newest independent newspaper, The Times of Tonga. The paper hit the street for the first time on the rainy morning of Thursday April 13 this year with the

aim of becoming “the major print

media in the kingdom”.

The Times is published by Lali Com munications. Publisher Kalafi Moala owns 80 per cent of the company, his

brother Pita holds 20 per cent, Austra lian missionary Tom Hallas 2.5 per cent and Honolulu businessman Sandy Santiago 2.5 per cent.

Moala, 41, was a Wesleyan missionary in Papua New Guinea, Hawaii, Hong Kong and Japan. His opposition in Tonga are the government weekly, Tonga Chronicle, the Catholic weekly Tauinu’a Lelei, the hard-hitting news heet Kele’a and the Matangi Tonga news magazine which comes out every two months.

Times of Tonga is fitted with nearly $130,000 worth of Macintosh compu

ters for word processing, typesetting and page layouts. The hardware, and software were bought with money drawn from Moala’s savings and “dona tions from friends”. The building they are in was bought with a loan from Bank of Tonga.

Times of Tonga covers Pacific and world news strongly while its sister pap er, the vernacular Koe Taimi o Tonga, is strong on local news and features.

World and Pacific news is drawn from a New Zealand Press Association service at the cost of SNZ3OO a week. □