Four months.

It’s hard to believe that today is four months to the day since the formal launch of Civil Beat. I hope that with our redesign this week, what we’re doing at this local news service is coming more and more into focus.

We’re taking the weekend off, but I think you’ll find plenty to read between now and Tuesday morning. I hope you’ll spend some time exploring what we’ve done over the past few months.

Before I make a few suggestions about articles you don’t want to miss, I want to thank Ryan Kanno and Mark Quezada, our software developers, for all their hard work taking our initial basic design and creating something new that I think captures the many notes we want to play on this website.

In a way, Civil Beat is a news service that has turned the traditional approach inside out. What I love about the new site is that it feels like the work we’re doing is much more readily visible to you. All the pieces and all the tones now have a place on our home page, including much higher profile treatment of the comments from our members.

At Civil Beat, we’re asking our reporter-hosts to do more than would be customary at most traditional news organizations. We’re asking them to take their work further. It’s not easy. This week’s coverage of Monday night’s Hawaii News Now/Honolulu Star-Advertiser debate is an example. We were all over the map.

• The Gov Debate Before It Happens told you what we already knew the candidates would say. Serious fun is what I would call a piece like that.
• Following the Gov Debate, in 140 Characters or Less told the story of the event by collecting Hawaii beat reporter-host Chad Blair’s tweets from inside the debate hall.
• Lightning Round: The Governor Debate told you what the debate told us about the candidates and the state of the race.
• Audience Disrupts TV Debate gave an instant critique of how the audience was allowed to disrupt the debate and how the host news organizations covered it.
• Hannemann: Environmental Impact Statements Average 14 Years was an example of a Fact Check done as the debate was going on.
• Abercrombie: It’s Love-Hate With Congress.org was another such Fact Check.

Think of this type of coverage as Civil Beat trying to hold up an important event and look at it from different perspectives. We hope that approach is helpful to you as you try to make sense out of the candidates and issues.

Original, thoughtful reporting takes a lot of work. Yet when it comes time to present our articles to you, we need to make it as little work as possible for you to read them. I think of it as keeping friction to a minimum.

I think that’s what Katherine Poythress did this week with her articles on whether the public can trust the state’s assessment of student progress, a fundamental question.

• Can Hawaii Student Test Scores Be Trusted?
• Hawaii Test Standards Compared

The same can be said of Nanea Kalani’s articles on the city’s PR spending for the rail project. Of course the public needs to be informed about such a major venture, but it sure seemed strange how little the city could tell us about how it spent $2 million.

• No Public Accountability for Rail PR Contracts
• How the City Spent $2 Million on Rail PR

At Civil Beat, our belief is that transparency should be a core value of government. That means agencies should be turning themselves inside out to make it as easy as possible for the public to understand how they’re operating, everything from contracts to salaries.

We figure that we’ve got to start with the basics, to get the facts on the table. That’s why, for example, Adrienne LaFrance has explored what’s happened with the size of city government under former Mayor Mufi Hannemann, Hannemann’s Honolulu Hale Examined . The public needs to know the basic outline of what’s happened, and it’s not necessarily the case that the information the city provides is going to be in a form that anybody can reach his or her own conclusion.

The same applies to the question of how the state spends money on salaries.

This week we published a package of stories by Nanea that laid out spending on salaries for more than 7,500 employees of the University of Hawaii.

• Civil Beat Shares University of Hawaii Salaries
• Highest Paid at University of Hawaii
• Lowest Paid at University of Hawaii
• Who Works at University of Hawaii

Those followed another package on state salaries for more than 14,000 employees.

• Civil Beat Shares Hawaii State Employee Salaries
• Hawaii’s Highest Paid State Employees
• Hawaii’s Lowest Paid State Workers
• How Everyone Knew My Salary

More on government spending, salaries and contracts is on the way. We’re here to serve you, to put you into a position where you can act as informed citizens, to connect you with others who care.

It’s a privilege — and serious work.