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By now, you’ve probably noticed some significant changes to our website.

We learned from the way readers responded to our live blogs — for APEC, the labor board hearing and the tsunami, for example — that they were looking for more quick news bytes throughout the day. They valued our in-depth journalism, but also wanted our take on the news of the day. So we’ve taken steps we think better serve readers interested in specific subject areas.

Now, when you go to a beat page – Honolulu, Hawaii, Education, Land, Money — you’ll find a blog by our reporters updating you on interesting and important news. We think of reporter-hosts as guides, informed friends who can tell you what’s going on. The reporters are using the blogs to report quick news items, to direct you to stories they think you should be aware of and to share their experience trying to report the news in Hawaii. These are an addition to the in-depth reporting you can find on the site every weekday.

We’ve made the blogs, which were launched in December, much more visible. Even when they were hard to find, 40,000 people read them in January. So we decided to make them a regular staple on the site. If you want to track all of the updates in one place, you’ll find the latest blog posts streaming through our home page, in a box on the left side under a heading that says “Reporter Blogs.”

Finally, if you want to know about Hawaii news and opinion that matters, the place to turn is now prominently displayed at the center of our home page. It’s called “,” a compilation by Civil Beat’s editors. We hope you make The Beat a regular part of your day.

We hope you find that these additions to our site serve you well.