Several new features in The Bee have put a sharper focus on some important areas of coverage.

You might have overlooked them amid all the other changes in the paper, so I thought I'd say a bit more about each.

"The Public Eye" is a weekly column in the Our Region section motivated by the idea that our job is to watch out for people in our communities.

Published on Thursdays, "The Public Eye" includes two or three short items a week from local reporters who are looking at government, public safety and community involvement.

Reporter Terri Hardy wrote the other day about the decision by Ann Marie Gold, director of the Sacramento Public Library, to hire a "crisis communications" consultant to help her with media inquiries. The library and its director, under scrutiny by the local grand jury over a variety of financial management questions, employ a staff public information director as well as a marketing manager.

In its first three installments, "The Public Eye" also has: told readers to watch out for people posing as city employees and asking for donations in front of a local Wal-Mart; highlighted a few things that needed fixing (and got fixed after being publicized); and zeroed in on neighborhood crime trends in several areas.

Deborah Anderluh, Bee city editor, said the new column is part of a broader push on local public-interest reporting and will include four general types of items.

"Money trail" items will look at local government spending. "Fix this" reports will respond to reader problems and inquiries. "Crime line" items examine local crime trends and offer public safety tips. A fourth type of item, "In the spotlight," will highlight people making a difference by fixing problems on a community level.

Another new feature is "The State Worker," which runs each Thursday on our Capitol & California page, A3. Reporter Jon Ortiz, who also covers business topics, launched the column along with an online blog just as Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger announced plans to cut state employee pay to the federal minimum wage until a new budget was passed.

The column, Ortiz says, aims to tell state workers' stories – "showing how the tensions of governing play out on the battlefield."

He mentioned David McCullough's book "1776," a masterful work that told the story of the Revolution not just in the frame of historical narrative but also from the vantage point of soldiers in George Washington's army.

"What makes the book so compelling is that you see the Revolution from the viewpoint of people doing the killing or being killed, not just from Washington's tent," Ortiz noted in an e-mail. "State workers are the people who do the killing and get killed, but traditional political coverage usually stays in the tent."

Ortiz is working to make the "State Worker" blog a go-to information source and community square for and about state employee issues.

The last new feature I'll mention is "Second Opinion," a weekly column in our Sunday Health & Fitness section that draws on experts in the help center of California's Department of Managed Health Care. Each week, the column answers specific questions from local people about health care and insurance coverage.

"Second Opinion" joins our rotating columns from local doctors and expanded health and fitness coverage from reporter Sam McManis.

On another matter, look for some changes Monday on our Fun & Games comics pages. We've modified the crossword puzzle that was "squished" in our redesign, decreased the size of the section title and increased the size of the type on several strips.

Reach The Bee's editor, Melanie Sill, at (916) 321-1002.