The Community Will Always Remember Emme’s Contributions and Trailblazing, She Was an Inspiration to Many

The Filipino community, Filipino ethnic media join the rest of Hawaii in mourning the loss of Emme Tomimbang Burns who was a pioneering local broadcaster for women and Filipino journalists. Tomimbang Burns, mostly known to her friends and the public as simply Emme, was a larger-than-life individual who wore many suits as a news broadcaster, producer, entrepreneur, philanthropist, and community leader.

She broke ceilings in journalism by becoming one of the first women and ethnic in local broadcast TV in the 1970s. She started doing weather and gradually worked her way up to anchoring at several news stations by the 1980s. Her career lasted decades and she had become a household name by the time she left the newsroom to start her own media production company where she produced the popular Emme’s Island Moments that lasted more than 20 years.

Emme was a talented storyteller who had a natural gift to make those she interviewed comfortable enough to share details in their lives that other journalists couldn’t.  This gift and breezy feature-style interviews on personalities that Emme possessed drew comparisons to another pioneering journalist, the late Barbara Walters – with some calling Emme the Barbara Walters of Hawaii.

While that is a highly esteemed comparison, Emme was unique and certainly a legend of her own, a local leader who’ve given back graciously to the greater Hawaii community through scholarships at Farrington High School (her alma mater) and the University of Hawaii’s medical school, the John A Burns School of Medicine (JABSOM).  JABSOM is named after the late Hawaii Governor, the father of Emme’s husband the late Supreme Court of Appeals Chief Judge James S. Burns.

To the Filipino community, Emme will always be remembered for her decades of contributions to various projects and philanthropy. She’s helped raise tens of thousands of dollars for the Filipino Community Center. She’s led public awareness campaigns, one example, the need for our community to get the COVID-19 vaccination in the early days when it took convincing by people who the public trusted. And Emme was such an individual that our community trusted.

Role Model in media
Emme was an inspiration to many Filipino journalists over the years. Some veteran Filipino journalists who were pioneers in their own right looked to Emme as a role model because she was the first Filipino in mainstream local news. This holds true for women journalists in Hawaii as well as Emme was among that first group of women TV journalists in the state.

What we hear from some Filipino journalists who’ve worked in the 1990s, 2000s and present is that while Emme no longer was in the news stations with them, she made herself available to them, offering helpful tips, guidance, and contacts. That was simply Emme’s nature as a force of positivity, a human being with attributes of kindness, someone wanting to help others, these journalists say.

Another common comment Filipino journalists and Filipino leaders in the community would say is Emme was always proud of her ethnicity and the community she grew up in. Emme was concerned about our community, others perception of our community, and she did all she could to help uplift that perception by highlighting areas and contributions Filipinos of Hawaii could be proud of.

New role models on different frontiers of media
Since Emme’s early years in the newsroom that she’s helped to shepherd in a new era of Filipino and women journalists, media has changed dramatically. Technology and social media have expanded how people get their news wherein traditional sources of media share the limelight with new media outlets and organizations on the internet.

In this new frontier of podcasts, live streams, social media accounts on YouTube, etc. there is a jockeying for: 1) viewership, 2) legitimacy and 3) credibility. There are a few independent news programs that have met all these requirements and produce weekly, even daily content.  Communications experts say this is the wave of the future that even traditional media are starting to replicate as they hire social media journalists and podcasters to prop up their news content.

In this new frontier, we have yet to encounter a trailblazer like Emme. As independent digital news becomes even more entrenched in news broadcasting, we encourage our Filipino community to be a pivotal part of this movement.

We will need more tech savvy, trained, and educated Filipino journalists to make their mark in this new frontier of media as Emme had done in traditional media. And to take it one step further as Emme had done as an entrepreneur in traditional media, for future Filipino journalists in this new frontier to become entrepreneurs in new media.

When you look at this futuristic goal where pioneers of new media are beginning to make their mark, we are reminded of the truly remarkable accomplishments Emme has achieved as a pioneering broadcaster starting in the 1970s.

The ethnic media that we are a part of is rooted in more independent news delivery. We share fundamentals in journalism as mainstream, larger corporate news organizations. But we are unique in our advocacy as a niche media outfit, which actually is what most news organizations have been transitioning into these past decades. In this respect, the ethnic media is pioneering in our own ways.

But even those of us in Hawaii’s ethnic media can appreciate the significant role Emme has had in local media that served the larger community. We pay tribute to Emme and her legacy. Mabuhay Emme!