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If you run into and he tells you he’s a Civil Beat intern he really is.

Some of you may remember that Ron ran for Honolulu mayor this year but lost in the primary. That’s when we first met him. He made a good case for giving some press time to candidates who weren’t career politicians but who still had legitimate positions the public should know about. So we decided to feature him and a few other lesser-known mayoral candidates in episodes of the Pod Squad podcast. 

That might have been the extent of our relationship with Ron. But he can be persistent.

In August, Ron came to our first “Coffee and Conversation,” a monthly event for members who want to get to know more about Civil Beat. We’ve started doing these since we became a nonprofit in June as a benefit for our donors.

Afterwards, he came up to me and asked if he could be an unpaid intern for Civil Beat. He had become intrigued with the news business during his campaign for mayor, he said, and he wanted to volunteer for us. Hang around the newsroom. Learn about being a journalist. Do whatever we wanted him to do.

Gosh, I said, I don’t know what you would do. Our interns are usually college kids who are enrolled in journalism classes and have some kind of training and understanding of how our business works.

So I politely begged off. To tell you the truth, I have never been a fan of journalistic trends like crowdsourcing or citizen journalism efforts. There is too much room for mistakes and there always seems to be axes to grind. Our credibility is everything.

A few days later Ron emailed me. He’d enrolled in an eight-week online journalism course called “” offered by the University of Melbourne in Australia. Maybe after he finished it we could talk again, he wondered. Or maybe he could get advice as he went through the program.

I checked it out. It looked like a good program, covering everything from news writing to ethics. The professors say in the intro video that since the course has been offered they’ve had 18,000 students from 178 countries.

I signed up for it, too. Hey, it’s free and I wanted to see if it was really a decent program. And then I emailed Ron and asked him to come by and talk with me and a couple other editors.

Todd Simmons, our opinion editor, after hearing about Ron and his efforts to break into our world, suggested that people like Ron would likely be a good resource for a news organization like Civil Beat.

Ron, 72, is an Ewa Beach resident who has lived in Hawaii for 48 years. His incredibly diverse background includes more than 20 years as a vice president at Merrill Lynch, a calling as a Catholic monk at a young age, a vice principal at St. Louis School and as deputy director of a program for at-risk youth.

So for the past few weeks Ron has spent a couple days each week sitting quietly at a table in our newsroom. We put him to work entering names and other information into a database we have long wanted to build but haven’t had anyone who had time to do the data entry.

Anthony Quintano, our engagement editor who has been bugging reluctant reporters to shoot more video when they go out on assignment, has spent a few hours teaching Ron how to take video on his phone. We’ll likely send Ron along with a writer to some press conference or events where he will be a useful extra hand. You can see some of the videos below.

Ron has expressed a real interest in affordable housing which is one of our main issues, too. So we have asked him to do some research for us that may well involve interviewing public officials and seeking records from public agencies and other organizations. Please help him out if you can.

If he does well in his news writing course, you may even see his byline in Civil Beat.

So where is this all going? We’re not quite sure but we are looking to Ron to be more than just free labor.

Ron is really a guinea pig, another experiment for Civil Beat. We thought we’d give it a few months to see if there is meaningful work that retirees or semi-retired volunteers who want to continue to make a difference in this community can help with. Not just stuffing envelopes or working pledge drives like other nonprofits have them do.

If we can get some structure to this, we have an idea to offer a formal opportunity to people who would be interested — sort of a “kupuna fellows” program, as Todd calls it.

We are far from that point, but let us know what you think of the idea. And until then I’m sure we are as much of a test case for Ron as he is for us. But at least we are both trying something new.