Journalists typically get into this field for the same reason people become attorneys or social workers or maybe even politicians: We want to be part of changing things for the better. As reporters and editors, we can’t make those changes ourselves, but we can ignite the spark. We call that impact and here at Civil Beat, we’re kind of scientific in the ways we measure our impact on Hawaiʻi. You can see the full sweep of it on our impact page.
We break things down into three main categories:
- Reach is the number of people who come into contact with our work. For you to make something happen either yourself or through advocacy, you have to first see the story. We measure reach not just in clicks on our website, but in views and shares on social media as well as pickup by other media.
- Engagement includes participation in our events or public discussion of our reporting. Maybe you attended one of our 36 events last year, ranging from popups at farmer’s markets to candidate Q&As all over the islands, commented on stories via our website or social media, or maybe you wrote a Voices piece on a topic that moves you.
- Action is the coin of the realm, when someone is prompted by our journalism to act, whether that means pushing for or enacting a new law or improving a single person’s life. You may have tuned in one of the 49 times Civil Beat came up in testimony at the state Capitol in 2025, which you can track using our new Digital Democracy tool.
As we look back on the year, I wanted to spend a little more time with that third measurement today. Natalie Thielen Helper, our grant writer who is co-writing this column, logs it all for us and below are a few of the action highlights she tracked during 2025. As you will see, many of these changes came months and even years after we first reported on the problems. Improvement takes time.
Some of the problems we uncovered caught the eye of state legislators……