One of the legacies of Central Pacific Bank's 2005 takeover of City Bank has been wiped off the company's books.

When Central Pacific Financial Corp. announced last week was taking a $102 million goodwill, impairment charge, it eliminating the remaining goodwill on its balance sheets. (See:)

The goodwill is value of a company above its book value. Central Pacific accumulated more than $300 million in goodwill after its 2005 merger with the parent of City Bank, which boosted the company's stock price.

The loss of $300 million in value is one of the largest ever suffered by a local bank, but it's still not the largest ever in Hawaii.

That dubious honor goes to The Carlyle Group's $1.6 billion takeover of Hawaiian Telcom Inc. in 2005. Based on the company's bankruptcy reorganization, the company is now valued at about $460 million, or a loss of more than $1.14 billion in value.

Other notable local writedowns include:

-- The 2008 shutdown of Aloha Airlines. California billionaire Ron Burkle bet $100 million to bring the local carrier out of bankruptcy in five years ago only to see the airline hit by soaring fuel prices and a costly interisland fare war.

-- In 1993, the 1,200-room Hyatt Regency Waikoloa was purchased by Colony Capital Inc. of Los Angeles for $60 million, or about one-sixth of the $360 million it took to build the resort.

-- Two years later, Colony Capital acquired the 539-room Ritz Carlton Mauna Lani for $75 million, or $100 million less than its original construction costs.

-- Star-Bulletin owner David Black says he has lost more than $100 million since he acquired the daily newspaper in 2001. But Black is hoping to make up some of those losses through his purchase of the larger Honolulu Advertiser.

As local media companies have lost millions of dollars and are in the midst of unprecedented consolidation, eBay Inc. founder Pierre Omidyar's launch of his new online news service definitely runs counter to the economic currents.

But backers of the news service, dubbed Civil Beat, insist that the local start-up will eventually make money. (See:)

Unlike traditional newspapers, Civil Beat is purely online and does not have the same built-in costs that legacy media companies have, such as newsprint and circulation and delivery costs.

Civil Beat's business model doesn't rely heavily on advertising revenues but is largely based on its $20 a month subscription costs.

The cost is steep compared to what the local dailies charge. I think the Honolulu Advertiser charges about $15 a month while the Star-Bulletin's monthly subscription is about $12.

But at $20 a month, it wouldn't take that many subscribers to break even.

Civil Beat and its parent Peer News is a private company so details about its expenses are not public.

But given Civil Beat's staff of about a dozen or so workers, the company's  annual payroll expenses including benefits can't be more than a $1 million.

Civil Beat would need about 4,200 paid subscribers to cover those costs.

To put that into perspective, The Advertiser has 115,000 subscribers while the Star-Bulletin's paid circulation is about 37,000.

So Civil Beat's goal of becoming economically sustainable is reachable.

The big hurdle is getting subscribers to fork over $20 a month for the news service at a time when media  companies are giving away their content for free, experts said.

"Newspapers have found that it's very difficult to get people to pay for anything online," said Gerald Kato, journalism professor at the University of Hawaii-Manoa.

"Is the content and the reporter-hosts so enticing to you that you would pay the $20 a month to engage in this conversation?"

For any of you who has thought about ditching your cable television service, you're not alone.

A report released last week by Convergence Consulting Group Ltd. of Canada estimated that as many as 800,000 households nationwide got rid of their cable services during the past two years. (See:)

That's still a small fraction of 100 million-plus subscribers to cable, satellite and other broadcast services. But don't be surprised to see those number grow, in wake of the continued economic downturn.

Subscribing to cable or having your own satellite disk is almost as American as owning a car.

It's almost a necessity  in places like Hawaii whose hilly terrain sometimes blocks where the over-the-air broadcast signals to neighborhoods. I think Oceanic Time Warner Cable has locked up  about 90 percent of the local market. (See:)

But if it's a choice between adding more food on the table and getting rid of your $50 a month charge for standard cable service, it's not a difficult decision.

More than a year ago, the Honolulu Advertiser implemented a 10 percent wage cut, which prompted me to reassess all of my unnecessary expenses. I needed to cut my costs by at least $200 a month.

Out went the daily plate lunch, the 3 p.m. Starbucks runs and, of course, my cable service. I also chucked by $44.95 a month Road Runner Internet service and replaced with a much cheaper mobile broadband services like Clearwire.

If you don't watch too much television, it's livable tradeoff. The Clearwire signal isn't always clear but it gets the job done.

I don't follow any show in particular and don't the time to sit through a two-hour movie, although I do follow sports regularly. Still, I'd rather go to the gym, play tennis or go to the beach.

If I need to watch T.V., it's usually to catch up on the news. I can now do that online.

Internet video sites like Hulu, Veoh or Apple's iTunes service don't carry enough programming yet. But eventually they will and -- if the cable and satellite operators don't reduce prices -- you're going to see more people cutting the cord.

Monday is D-Day for the sale of the Honolulu Star-Bulletin.

But whether the newspaper ends up being sold will depend on whether bids exceed the cost of selling off the Star-Bulletin's assets individually.

Under the guidelines set up with the Justice Department and the state Attorney General's office, any offers for the Star-Bulletin must exceed "liquidation value" of the paper's assets.

The Star-Bulletin owner Oahu Publications did not say what that value is.

Daily newspapers used to be worth tens of millions of dollars but with the economic collapse of the industry, they're worth very little.

Last month, the Daytona Beach News-Journal sold for about $20 million last month, or about $280 million less than what it was worth four years ago.

One industry expert said the price for the Florida paper was equivalent to the liquidation value of its real estate.

The liquidation value of the Star-Bulletin is probably worth less than half a million dollars, based on the assets being sold.

Here's what they're listing:

-- the Star-Bulletin's masthead, its circulation lists and Website;

-- its printing press, which includes 18 Goss Urbanite units. (Insiders jokingly refer to this as "da junk press." Oahu Publications is keeping the newer, Goss Community Press that it has in Kaneohe.)

-- three inserting machines;

-- single company news racks;

-- and miscellaneous office equipment and furniture.

(The sale of the Star-Bulletin gives bidders the option of not buying the land and the building that houses the newspaper's Kaneohe printing press.)

The urbanite printing press is pretty old and any buyer probably would want to get their own press.

One industry expert I talked to this week expressed surprise that the Justice Department is requiring a bidder to purchase the press since it would be better to start over with a new press or used one that's better suited to the buyer's needs.

The Star-Bulletin's masthead, circulation lists website, news racks and equipment doesn't appear to carry a lot of value.

Nearly a decade ago when David Black purchased the Star-Bulletin, he paid just $10,000 for these items.

It will be hard to argue that the value of these items have appreciated in light of news reports that the Star-Bulletin has lost more than $100 million since 2001.

Paid circulation also has declined by nearly half to about 37,000 during that period.

Final bids are due at 5 p.m. for the state's no. 2 newspaper.

It looks like the bidders -- Texas private equity investor Brian Ferguson and state Sen. Sam Slom and Malia Zimmerman, editor of the online news site Hawaii Reporter  -- are going ahead with their offers

So it will all come down to whether the bids are high enough.

The  Honolulu Star-Bulletin's fate as an independent daily newspaper is headed into a critical juncture this week.

At least two bidders remain in the running to purchase the state's no.2 newspapers, which is being sold by owner David Black to make way for his purchase of The Honolulu Advertiser.

If anything, the two bidders are a study in contrasts.

Brian Ferguson is  a 30-year-old private equity investor from Austin, Tex. who was once described by a Dallas magazine as a "whiz kid" with a preference for Dr. Pepper and Big Macs. (See:)

The other group includes 67-year-old Republican state Sen. Sam Slom and his partner Malia Zimmerman, the 41-year-old editor of the Hawaii Reporter online news site.

Ferguson, was part of a group, Anthem Holdings LLC, that purchased 7 percent of the A.H. Belo Corp. newspaper chain last year. The group now has about 3.2 percent of the company's shares.

Ferguson has an eclectic background.

An attorney and accountant, he is a founding partner of TXA Explorations, which invests in oil and gas exploration and production. He also is a managing principal of Priority Tax Management, a property tax consulting firm in Texas.

Ferguson's name has turned up in a number of newspaper deals including the 150-year-old Rocky Mountain News in Denver, which shut down last year, and the Austin American-Statesman, which he attempted to purchase with Waco businessman Clifford Robinson and Walter Hussman Jr., the publisher of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. (See:)

Cox Enterprises took the Austin paper off the market, saying the bids for the newspaper were too low.

To be sure, Ferguson's main concern is not in saving the Star-Bulletin, as David Black had done in 1999. Ferguson's interests in the daily paper are mainly financial.

While Black is only listing the money-losing Star-Bulletin for sale, Ferguson's proposal included an offer to purchase the profitable MidWeek publication.

A beefed up MidWeek and a scaled down Star-Bulletin will likely be part of Ferguson's business plan.

That offer echoes arguments by the newspaper's union, the Hawaii Newspaper Guild, which is lobbying the U.S. Justice Department to investigate the anti-competitive impact of the combination of the 115,000-subscriber Advertiser and Midweek, which is mailed to 280,000 households on Oahu.

The Zimmerman-Slom proposal is rooted in community efforts preserve two separate editorial voice, while preserving jobs and broading coverage to include more Neighbor Island issues.

Under their plan, the print edition of the Star-Bulletin probably won't be published seven days a week as it is now but will likely be more like three days a week, like papers in Detroit are being published.

One of my colleagues, KITV reporter Daryl Huff, believes that Slom and Zimmerman want to use the Star-Bulletin to promote a conservative agenda.But the duo say their personal views will not affect news coverage. They also say they want to make a buck and providing balance reporting is the only way to reach the largest, broadest audience.

Both Ferguson and the Zimmerman-Slom team will have until next Monday to amend their bids to  meet the requirements of Black, who has expressed doubts that the newspaper will be sold due to the massive losses that the newspaper has sustained during the past 10 years.

The bidders will also have to satisfy the concerns of the Justice Department and the Attorney General's office, which are supervising the sale.

No doubt, we'll be hearing more over the next few days about how these two offers are shaping up.