Sometimes I’m asked what’s different about journalism at Civil Beat.

A few examples of our work from this week might help answer that question.

Reporting at most news organizations tends to be episodic, responding to events. The coverage is broad, but not always deep.
At Civil Beat, we focus on covering important issues, and sticking with them. We try to build a base of knowledge members can tap into at any time. We keep probing to expose as many layers of a story as possible.

Two articles by Adrienne LaFrance on SB 2045, Hawaii’s proposed anti-human trafficking law now on the governor’s desk, are a good example of what I’m talking about. There’s a conflict over whether the bill is a good step for Hawaii, with law enforcement and prosecutors opposed, the Legislature unanimously in favor and a number of nonprofits passionately pushing for it.

To cut through the conflict, we decided to look at how New York, a state with a widely respected and tested — at least for a few short years — law, is tackling the same issue. The resulting article, and a related article comparing the New York and Hawaii laws on a point-by-point basis, provided perspective that’s not readily available. One thing that we’ll emphasize in our journalism is providing a larger context for events and decisions in Hawaii. It’s important to pull back and try to look at the bigger picture.

Something else that makes our journalism different is our commitment to using primary documents, the original source material, and not just basing our reporting on what people tell us or their summary of a document. We not only will be using these key documents, we’ll be making them accessible to you.

This week came a huge test in that area: the release of the Final Environmental Impact Statement for Honolulu’s proposed rail project. The document is gigantic. The city is making it available on a CD. But our Randy Ching figured out a way to post it in its entirety on our site. We’ll be sharing more such documents in the future.

That doesn’t mean we expect you to do our work. Piecing together all the necessary information to get a complete picture of any subject can be challenging. We know you don’t generally have the time to do it, so we’re trying to do the work for you. This is another way that journalism at Civil Beat is different.

A good example was this week’s special report on teacher compensation by our Education beat reporter, Katherine Poythress. Our education coverage centers on two issues: student achievement and accountability. Clearly, teachers are the most important (Yes, parents are important, too, but we don’t pay them to help children) factor in student achievement. So does the state’s compensation system encourage both accountability and achievement? To begin to answer that question, we explored what the system is today, how it works and whom it benefits. We hope that her package of stories made clear how Hawaii compensates teachers — and that it’s important to consider the whole compensation package when the issue of teacher pay is debated.

Finally, something else that’s different about our journalism, is the way we approach information. Katherine built a topic page on teacher compensation that will be a living resource for our members. They can turn to it any time they have questions about the issue. It’s designed not as an article about a specific aspect of pay – say what did furloughs mean financially to a teacher – but to give a reliable overview about a subject worth understanding.

As you take time for yourself this weekend, I’d ask you to consider setting aside a few minutes to make your own contribution to Civil Beat. No, not financial. We appreciate your support in that area. This time we’re asking you to consider sharing your voice. We believe Civil Beat should be a place where members and others share their thoughts on issues important to them, not just the issues we cover in our articles. We’re looking for submissions on the meaning of independence in the year 2010. All the details about how to participate are contained in this article.

I hope to hear from you.