Media and democracy can mean a lot of things -- getting rid of payola pundits, ensuring disclosure of fake news and challenging government propaganda. But it also means using technology to further democratize new media. That’s one goal of our newly-redesigned website [3].

One of the first things you'll probably notice is the three feature boxes on the home page. These areas will highlight our most important breaking news items, be they original CMD reports [4], short Spin of the Day [5] items or our Weekly Radio Spin [6].

We're always thinking about ways to make it easier for our readers to get around the site. So, we've made several modifications aimed at simplifying site navigation, including the main drop-down menu and a "tag cloud" that highlights the most popular topics on PR Watch.

We've also fine-tuned our Weekly Radio Spin feature. We've combined the audio with the article text so now the Weekly Radio Spin can be played directly from the post announcing each week's segment -- no more drilling down to find the audio.

Registration is no longer required to make comments on our content -- you may now anonymously "tell it like it is."

In the coming weeks, you’ll see more new changes to the site. We want to engage our readers by making the website more interactive. We are planning to roll out a “voting” feature, which will allow users to rate articles. This will help us find out what posts are the most interesting to you and will also help us at the end of the year when we prepare our list of candidates for the "Falsies" awards [7].

If you have feedback regarding the functionality and design of the website, or ideas on how we can make the site more engaging, please feel free to leave us a comment under this blog. You may also send an email to webmaster@prwatch.org.

Acknowledgments

This site is powered by Drupal [8], an open-source, community-supported content management system. (It's a nice fit for a nonprofit challenging a top-down media system that’s prone to corporate and government spin.)

Our theme is based on the “Efficient” theme from ThemeSnap [9].

The mini icons we’re using (with the exception of our favicon) are provided by FamFamFam [10] free of charge.