Minna Sugimoto will leave Hawaii News Now on March 30 for a job outside the television industry.

“It will be a good transition for me,” she told TheBuzz. “I have been at KHNL and KFVE for 14 years, and I’m going to take a lot of fond memories with me.”

Her new job is with Hawktree International Inc., a diversified holding company with familiar business units including Island Movers Inc., Pro-File Records Systems and ICES, or International Convention and Event Services.

Sugimoto will serve the company as director of communications and public relations, reporting directly to CEO Donald Takaki.

What really got Sugimoto interested was the Hawktree Sports division, which schedules goodwill games between Hawaii teams and teams from Japan “and so forth,” she said.

Sugimoto said she was a “tomboy athlete” in her high school days and was, in fact, reached Thursday at a fundraiser for the Oahu Interscholastic Association, which she supports.

Sugimoto has worked in journalism since high school, first as a reporter and anchor for the old KHNR-AM 650, aka CNN Radio, then at KCCN-AM 1420. “Back then we had a full, operating newsroom.” Many radio stations did, back then.

Now, after 14 years in TV news, “I felt like I’ve done everything and want to take on new challenges.”

Ocean promotion

The nonprofit Waikiki Aquarium is inviting Hawaii high school and middle school students to create videos about ocean conservation that potentially could be seen around the world — and win them some sort of prize.

The winning video will be announced June 8 and shown at a conference in South Africa and at the Blue Ocean Festival in Monterey, Calif., in September.

Students can compete as individuals or in groups, said Andrew Rossiter, aquarium director.

In addition to international recognition, the winner will “receive a reward that has yet to be decided,” he said.

Waikiki Aquarium has partnered with two other facilities, the Cabrillo Marine Aquarium in California, and in Boulogne, France, the Nausicaa Aquarium, which also are staging similar contests.

The aquariums-created Youth on Board program encourages kids to tell others about the ocean near their homeland, with a bit of a challenge: The videos must be made without spoken words. Natural and created sound is permissible, and written words must be in English or French. Oh, and the unspoken storytelling should be done in 60 seconds or less, and another goal should be to make them humorous.

“The desire that they be humorous is for two reasons,” Rossiter said.

If the entries are kept short, they will be better tailored to people’s short attention span, “and portraying things in a humorous way tends to be more attention-grabbing than the doom and gloom” used to convey so many conservation messages, he said.

Humor is encouraged but not required, according to the official rules.

To get started, contestants need to complete an application, which can be downloaded from the aquarium website, and turn it in by April 20.

The completed video on CD and an entry form must be turned in by May 24, and approved video submissions will be uploaded to the respective aquariums’ YouTube Channels for the world to see. Each aquarium will select videos to move on to the international competition.

Full details are available at the aquarium website, as is a potentially inspirational webcam of the aquarium’s South Pacific Barrier Reef exhibit.

Reach Erika Engle at 529-4303, erika@staradvertiser.com or on Twitter as @erikaengle.