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Civil Beat has become well-known for public affairs reporting and investigative journalism. But I’d argue there’s been something missing.

We’re an online news site but we really haven’t been taking advantage of our “webbyness.” One of the exciting things about online journalism is that there is so much more you can do when you can combine excellent news reporting and writing with compelling video and photography and then layer in multimedia elements like livestreaming or real-time Skype interviews or audio slideshows.

Print news has readers, broadcast has viewers but the Internet has users. People like to hear the sound of someone’s voice as they tell their part of a story or watch the expression on their face. But they also like to examine things for themselves, click a link to read a report, talk with a community of likewise interested neighbors. Civil Beat users know they can find the documents and the data prominently linked or displayed on any of our stories; it’s something we bring to this community that few others do.

But now we’re adding in a new element that will allow us to tell the compelling stories of Hawaii in formats that are both engaging and provocative without sacrificing our core investigative mission.

Meet Joe Rubin, an award-winning investigative videographer and documentary producer whose passion for innovative storytelling will enhance our users’ online experience. Joe joined us this week as our new Director of Digital Media and is quickly putting in place some of those innovations.

As a video journalist, Joe helped usher in an era of backpack TV journalism, reporting from five continents for programs such as ABC’s Nightline and PBS’s Frontline World. He’s also written for the New York Times, Mother Jones and National Public Radio. iWitness, the webcam interview series he created and hosted for PBS’s Frontline/World, won the 2009 Webby for the .

More recently, Joe’s work has explored the future of energy and the political battles that erupt around crucial policy issues. A he produced for Al Jazeera English looked at a showdown in California over its global warming reduction law. Last year, with the California-based , he produced two documentaries delving into nuclear power safety in the United States.

This fall, Joe is set to travel to Japan with the support of an to document the dramatic ongoing debate over the role of nuclear power in that island nation. You’ll see his ongoing reports right here and we hope to produce a documentary exploring the parallel experiences of Hawaii and Japan as they both move toward a renewable energy future.

In the meantime, look for new regular multimedia elements on our site, including a weekly feature from our Washington, D.C. bureau where Mike Levine will update us on the issues affecting Hawaii. (Civil Beat is the only Hawaii news outlet with a fulltime reporter in the nation’s capital.)

And, of course, the videos. We’ve always shot our own video — using our handy iPhones. But now we’re investing in quality gear that will be in the hands of a pro.

Joe is already teaching our staff how to think visually, and that can only help our old-fashioned print-like storytelling as well. So stay tuned.