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This week brought to light an important question that I think sometimes gets overlooked: What are journalists for, anyway?

Is the role of a journalist to convey the information the government wants to share when it wants to share it? Or is the role of a journalist to ask the questions citizens want answered about how government works on behalf of the people?

Some people in government think it’s the former. We at Civil Beat think it’s the latter. Here are a few examples from our reporting this week alone.

We shared a few stories of government agencies preferring to stay in the shadows, rather than conduct the public’s business in public:

• Surprise! OHA Employees Are Public by Nanea Kalani told of the Office of Hawaiian Affairs’ attempt to prevent its employees from being subject to the same rules as all other state and local workers in Hawaii.

• OHA isn’t the only entity whose response to open records requests is to seek a way to scurry out of the sunlight into the shadows. The lieutenant governor’s office has been doing it for seven weeks, Another Road Block at Aiona’s Office essentially finding different ways to argue that its financial records shouldn’t be public.

• Government in the shadows isn’t just a state problem. Nor is it an issue raised only by reporters. This week in an article by Adrienne LaFrance, Mayor Says He’s Found “Circle the Wagons” Mentality at Honolulu Hale, we heard an extraordinary statement from Peter Carlisle. In discussing transparency in government, the new mayor revealed the environment he had discovered at Honolulu Hale since moving over from the prosecutor’s office.

What happens when Civil Beat asks the questions citizens want answered? Here are some examples:

• You may have noticed that our reporters Chad Blair and Adrienne LaFrance are sticking close to the action at Honolulu Hale and at the headquarters of the governor elect, Neil Abercrombie, Capitol Watch: Nov. 12 and Inside Honolulu: Nov. 12. We’re trying to use the good, old-fashioned reporting technique of actually being as close as possible to the people we want to tell you about as often as possible. Open records requests aren’t the only way to reveal how elected officials and government agencies operate. Another good method is called being there.

• Finally, I hope you didn’t miss Land Reporter Michael Levine‘s two-part report this week on the claim that Hawaii was the first state in the nation to make it mandatory that new homes install solar water heaters, Mandatory Solar Hot Water for New Homes: Don’t Believe It and State Allows Developers to Flout Solar Mandate. Those kinds of stories don’t come from passing on the press releases of government. They come from asking questions. In this case, government wasn’t so much defensive as ill-informed. Government officials were surprised by what we found. And we were surprised that the person responsible for running the program didn’t understand the intent of the law he was supposed to enforce.

I hope you see a trend here. At Civil Beat, we’re persistent. On Monday, you’ll see another example of what I’m talking about, the result of weeks of hard slogging as we probed the use of overtime in the City of Honolulu Roads Division. We went through a stack of overtime records 5-feet high to figure out how officials are managing tax dollars. What did we find? One hint: A city government that didn’t want to answer questions except in writing and five workers who earned more in overtime in a single year than they did in salary.

What I’m showing by way of these examples is what happens when this kind of journalism meets government that prefers doing things out of the public eye, in back rooms. Some may believe that Hawaii is best served by a press that just passes on what it’s told by politicians and government officials. We don’t. Our approach may ruffle feathers, but we believe it leads to a better end result for the community.

If you agree with our approach, there’s a way you can help. Remind your elected officials and government employees that they are public servants, in service to the public. That means the public has a right to know exactly how they are conducting the public’s business. When records are required to be public under the law, they need to make those records available without delay.

More importantly, public officials ought to follow the spirit of the law, which calls for transparency in order for citizens to better understand the functioning of government. The people are both the clients of government services and the funders of those services. Conducting the public’s business in public is the best way to improve the quality of the services delivered and to ensure that public funds are wisely spent.