Introducing ... your Web Editor. Me.

I’m Derek Paiva … the newest member of HAWAII Magazine’s full-time crack editorial and technical staff.

That’s me in the photo.

Hawaiimagazine.com’s HAWAII Today home page feed will be primarily edited by yours truly — on many occasions, I hope, sharing writing duties with HAWAII Magazine editor John Heckathorn, associate editor Sherie Char and contributing HAWAII writers.

My most recent gig was a seven-year stint as an entertainment writer for The Honolulu Advertiser — one of our city’s two major daily newspapers — where I wrote about all things music, nightlife and other features-ish subjects.

(Go ahead. Google my name. Yes, I really did interview Prince in the flesh. He was short, very well-dressed and singularly funky.)

My new job here marks a return to the offices of HAWAII publisher PacificBasin Communications — which gave me my first full-time post-college journalism gig as assistant editor of sister publication Hawaii Business Magazine from 1998 to 2000 — and a return to working with Heckathorn — who gave me my first real (and paid) journalism internship in 1997 with another PacificBasin sister pub, HONOLULU Magazine.

My plan is to keep posts and proceedings here at Hawaiimagazine.com fun, fresh, interesting, useful and pithy. Want a lengthy, deeply researched feature on the now quarter-century-old eruption at the Big Island’s Kilauea volcano? Check out HAWAII Magazine’s February print edition for a superb feature by contributing writer Donna O’Meara. The magazine provides depth.

But the web site will give you up-to-the-minute stuff.

Want to know if Kilauea started throwing out 1,000-plus foot lava fountains right this morning, or get a review of multi-million selling North Shore of Oahu resident/singer/songwriter Jack Johnson’s much-anticipated new album “Sleep Through the Static” the day it is released in February? Visit me here at hawaiimagazine.com.

I’ve lived here in Hawaii my entire life. I’m still infinitely fascinated by these islands. I’m still learning about them. This is going to be one fun job.

photo by Lina Jang