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At Civil Beat, behind every article stands one or often many “topic” pages. You’ll find a complete list of these pages under the All Content tab at the top of every page on the site.

Chad Blair, our Hawaii reporter, covered tourism for Pacific Business News and will develop stories on the topic in coming months. I hope you’ll see from the topic page he developed on Hawaii Tourism how valuable these pages can be as a resource, whether to brief you for a meeting or to help you understand what you’re reading on the site or elsewhere. The Hawaii Tourism page, just like our other topic pages, will be continually updated. And at the bottom of every page, you’ll find links to all the related articles, in case you’d like to read more.

I thought I’d share some examples from this one topic page of why we consider them as potentially even more valuable to our members than our articles.

Some of what you’d learn from the page:

• What’s coming up: In June 2010, many labor-union contracts covering hotel and food-and-beverage workers expire.
• Who are the key players.
• What’s the Transient Accommodations Tax? While many here complain about the so-called “Price of Paradise” because it’s so expensive to live here, the TAT gives a window on how important tourists are to funding state and local government.
• The origins of Hawaii’s tourism industry are said to date to the 1860s, when visitors traveled to Hawaii island to view Kilauea volcano. A house built on the rim of Halemaumau crater is believed to have been Hawaii’s first tourist hotel.
• Hawaii’s first tourism promotion came in 1903, when the Territorial Legislature funded a Hawaii Promotion Committee. Some 2,000 visitors came to the island that year. This fiscal year the Hawaii Tourism Authority will spend $61.5 million on marketing to increase visitor numbers and spending.

You get the picture. The topic page, and others like it, can help you understand articles on the site and issues facing the state. They’re why we try not to bulk up our articles with repetitive background. Instead, we link to our Topic pages and to outside primary sources from our articles.

I hope this explanation helps, and that you enjoy reading Chad’s article and topic page. In the end, we hope you’ll help us make these topic pages better. Please let us know when you see an example where we could improve them or where you think we’re off the mark. We welcome your suggestions.