I was missing from this space last week because I was at a conference in Phoenix on the future of news called News Foo.

Don’t ask about the name. It’s a long story.

But the meeting. That’s another story. About 150 people attended the invitation-only session, organized by Google, the Knight Foundation, and O’Reilly Media, with support from the Online News Association. It was held at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University.

The main thing I came away with from the free-wheeling conference was a sense of how much energy and excitement surrounds reinventing the news, especially from young technologists and journalists. I’ve attended many sessions of newspaper editors and managing editors. For many years, those have been colored by anxiety over trends that are troubling for mainstream news organizations.

In Phoenix, there was a feeling of creation, not destruction. When I was starting out as a journalist, most of us were looking for careers with organizations that could provide us the opportunity to do the work we wanted to do. Many of the people at this meeting were creating their own organizations and coming up with new ways things could be done.

I left Phoenix recharged. No, I don’t know exactly what the model of the future will look like. I figure there’ll be many. But I do believe that the people who gathered in Phoenix and many others working today will find a way forward and that opportunities for journalists in the future will be far greater than those of us in our 50s had when we entered the profession decades ago.

Civil Beat is one of many enterprises across the country pushing to reinvent the field.

A few examples of our work from this week:

The week started with a flurry with the inauguration of Gov. Neil Abercrombie. I hope you didn’t miss our coverage, which included a multimedia presentation, a live account of the day and analysis.

When I returned to work Monday, I found a letter on my desk that made my day. The state courts are reconsidering their policy of charging just to review a public record, an issue Civil Beat brought to their attention. I was taken aback when our Robert Brown went to District Court to look at case files to try to understand how the courts handle prostitution and was told he’d have to pay $5 to look at each file. Every step we make toward greater access is important.

Although our focus at Civil Beat is local news about Honolulu and Hawaii, what has happened with WikiLeaks has touched close to home. Not just because we’re concerned with the importance of making sure the public understands the practices and policies of its government. But from our standpoint as an Internet-only publisher, the attacks on WikiLeaks have raised real concerns about the power of government in the Internet era. I hope you didn’t miss our editorial, which has entered the global debate about WikiLeaks. Civil Beat was included in a summary of developments in the WikiLeaks case produced by the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University.

Civil Beat will continue to pound the drum about the value of government transparency. Next week you’ll see another example of how Civil Beat uses public records, this time the extraordinary overtime payouts by the state’s Department of Public Safety. We found one employee who worked 2,533 hours of overtime in one year. There’ll be a lot more to read throughout the week.

See you then.

John Temple was the first editor of Civil Beat.