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One lesson that was driven home by APEC came straight from you, our readers. And that was that many of you value live blogs as a way to stay up-to-date with what’s happening in Hawaii.

Our APEC live blog became a place to turn whenever people wanted to know what was going on. The same held true during the tsunami and last year’s election. We’ve also seen intense interest in specialty live blogs, such as our coverage of the Aloun Farms human trafficking case and the Hawaii Labor Relations Board hearings about the teachers union complaint against the state.

So today we’re making a shift at Civil Beat. We’re going to test whether a daily live blog is a service you’ll value. The new live blog, known as “The Beat,” will be a place where we share what we’re working on as stories are developing, other stories and opinion articles you should know about that we’ve published, stories from other news sources that we think you should know about and anything else we think merits your attention, including photos and videos.

The blog will present items quickly, and provide you links for more depth. We’ll continue our daily specialty blogs, Capitol Watch, Inside Honolulu and DC808. But in coming days we’re also going to add blogs for our Land, Education and Money beats. That way you can choose what you want to follow.

“The Beat” blog will organize the news for you so you can check in at any time of day or night and quickly catch up on news and opinion that matters.

At Civil Beat, we want to help you be in the know. We think our new live blog will help do that.

I hope you’ll let us know how you like this new feature, and how we could help make it serve you even better.