Today’s a milestone of sorts for Civil Beat. Three years ago today the newsroom staff met for the very first time in our Kaimuki offices.

Although we consider May 4, 2010, our actual birthday (the official launch date of our website), March 29 was the day we as a staff started cooking up what Civil Beat ought to be. 

We were a brand new startup with a brand new office. Except for Editor John Temple, we didn’t even have computers or phones. On the first day, there were just clean, uncluttered desks (highly unusual for a newsroom) with a single orchid plant on each.

Over the next few weeks, we talked about which issues we wanted to follow (State, City, Land, Education, Money). We researched and wrote our first Topic Pages. By late April we posted our first news stories, on Turtle Bay (by Michael Levine), Dan Inouye (by Chad Blair) and school furlough costs (by Katherine Poythress).

How time flies! Here were are, three years later. We’ve stretched and grown a lot since those early days. There are many new faces, but the same old mission — to write about news that matters in Hawaii, and to help more people participate in the civic square.

Here’s a candid from that first day:

— Sara Lin