10 Must Read Stories From The Week Of May 28 – 31

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There is an axiom among journalists, that it shouldn’t be about us. And yet the big news this week was mainly about us — and that’s a good thing.

Even as we continued our coverage of budgets and politics, Civil Beat and announced that we’re partnering on a new website that will take advantage of the best aspects of both news organizations. HuffPost Hawaii is expected to launch this fall; it’s a Huffington Post site but the content and editorial management will be provided by Civil Beat.

You can read Pierre Omidyar’s take on why this is great news for Hawaii here and my column on what this means for Civil Beat here.

The response from readers has been overwhelmingly positive and we hope that you’ll be pleased with the evolution of each site when HuffPost Hawaii actually starts up.

Still, I’ve read some comments from a number of people who are disappointed because they think somehow Civil Beat will be eaten by the Huffington Post monster. Or they don’t like Arianna Huffington’s brand of journalism which — no two ways around it — is snappier and more over the top than we are used to in the islands.

Since I’ll be in charge of both operations, I’d like to talk about some of these concerns. First, we’re still figuring this out. Your suggestions are most welcome and it would be great to know what you like best about Civil Beat and how you might like to see it evolve. These are the sort of questions that we are asking ourselves now.

But I want to be clear: Civil Beat will still be Civil Beat. We will not be gobbled up by the online behemoth, even if it is one of the largest news sites in the world.

If anything, HuffPost Hawaii will take some of the pressure off Civil Beat writers to crank out the sort of basic stories that everyone else in town is doing anyway. Civil Beat reporters will be able to spend more of their time working on things that are not being done by anyone else — whether that’s investigative projects, enterprising and explanatory efforts, or analyses of important issues.

It’s tough doing everything we currently do with six reporters, and HuffPost Hawaii will greatly assist in that effort.

But the two sites will be separate and distinct. Civil Beat stories will be aggregated — a few paragraphs maybe? — into articles for the new site. People who want the entire story will need to click back over to Civil Beat. Some Civil Beat content — we’re not yet sure how much or what — won’t be available on HuffPost Hawaii at all. HuffPost Hawaii content will appear on Civil Beat in the form of a news feed. At least that’s how we’re picturing it now.

As for HuffPost Hawaii, it will very definitely be a Huffington Post news site. Besides the national Huffington Post, there are regional spin-offs in half-a-dozen cities and half-a-dozen more in Europe and Canada, with more launching all the time. They look and feel very much the same, and that is by design. The Huffington Post has found a formula that readers like, as evidenced by the 75 million unique visitors who go to one of its sites every month.

Our partnership with Huffington Post is a new deal for the U.S., although similar to the international sites where Arianna Huffington has also partnered with existing news operations. As with those sites, here in Hawaii, we will be in charge of the editorial content and the editorial decisions for HuffPost Hawaii. While we’ll be following their layout and style — and even the sometimes screaming headlines — that distinguish Huffington Post in the online news world, we’ll continue to keep in mind the sensibilities of Hawaii residents and the cultural sensitivities unique to the islands.

One thing you should check out is Huffington Post’s section. It really conveys how Arianna very much believes in celebrating the things that are poignant and possible. The news doesn’t always have to be bad or critical in Huffington Post’s world.

Here at Civil Beat, we don’t actually do a lot of good news or feature treatments. Our investigative and watchdog effort is by nature generally more questioning. (Our critics sometimes call it “gotcha journalism.”)

So will they rub off on us or will we rub off on them? Hopefully the answer is: both. Either way, it’s going to be a much more interesting world for news junkies come the fall.

Meanwhile, here are 10 other stories from this week you won’t want to have missed:

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