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Editor’s Note: Encyclo has not been regularly updated since August 2014, so information posted here is likely to be out of date and may be no longer accurate. It’s best used as a snapshot of the media landscape at that point in time.

Honolulu Civil Beat is a for-profit online news organization covering Hawaii.

Civil Beat is a project of Peer News, a company founded in 2008 by eBay founder and chairman Pierre Omidyar and Randy Ching. It was announced in November 2009 and launched in May 2010. It has a staff of 12, initially led by John Temple, former editor of the now-defunct Rocky Mountain News, though he left in April 2012 to become the Washington Post’s managing editor. The organization opened a Washington bureau in summer 2011.

Civil Beat charges for much of its content, a strategy that has drawn some skepticism. The site charges $9.99 for full access, down from its initial fee of $19.99 per month. Access also includes daily email summaries and admission to events. It has also shifted from a hard paywall to a metered model.

Civil Beat specializes in coverage of local and state politics, education, land, and money. The site is oriented toward coverage of issues rather than breaking news, though it does use its Twitter account for breaking-news coverage. It also includes dozens of topic pages on local issues.

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Omidyar has said his goal with the site is to “create the new civic square.” To that end, discussion is a central part of Civil Beat’s strategy, with its journalists — called “reporter hosts” — actively participating in comment threads on the site.

In 2013, Civil Beat partnered with The Huffington Post to launch HuffPost Hawaii, a site managed by Civil Beat that would shortened versions of its local coverage as well as cultural coverage aimed at travelers from the U.S. and Japan.

The site also runs the Civil Beat Law Center for the Public Interest, which works to help the media and public get access to public information.

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Peers, allies, & competitors:

I-News, MinnPost, Voice of San Diego

Recent Nieman Lab coverage:

May 7, 2024 / Joshua Benton

This year’s Pulitzer Prizes were a coming-out party for online media — and a marker of local newspapers’ decline — Some day in the distant future, scholars looking back on the evolution (devolution?) of the American news business will consider May 6, 2024 a date worthy of note. They’ll see it as the day the most prestigious pri...

Nov. 29, 2022 / Hanaa' Tameez

Coming to a Hawaii library near you: Honolulu Civil Beat is hosting pop-up newsrooms around the state — In local news, it can be tough to strike the right balance between time spent working in the newsroom and time spent out in the communities you cover. The latter is crucial to painting an accurate picture of your coverag...

June 12, 2018 / Christine Schmidt

A definitive playbook: How to DIY a local nonprofit news outlet — A decade ago, if you decided to create your own nonprofit news outlet to focus on local issues, you were largely operating without a playbook as an early entrant to the local nonprofit news scene. Now, with dozens and do...

Sept. 11, 2017 / Ricardo Bilton

Honolulu Civil Beat wants to use its bot to deepen ties with readers (and find some new stories, too) — Bots on Facebook Messenger have been, at best, a mixed bag so far. When Facebook opened up Messenger to brands last April, the immediate — and unsurprising — reaction among publishers was to see the chat app as yet a...

Sept. 11, 2017 / Ricardo Bilton

Bots de bate-papo ajudam redação a falar com leitores e descobrir histórias na comunidade — ots no Facebook Messenger tem sido, na melhor das hipóteses, uma experiência irregular até agora. Quando o Facebook abriu o Messenger a marcas em abril, a reação imediata e não surpreendente entre editores foi ver ...

All Lab posts on Honolulu Civil Beat »

Recently around the web, from Mediagazer:

All Mediagazer posts on Honolulu Civil Beat »

Primary author: Mark Coddington. Main text last updated: October 2, 2013.

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