As RH Reality Check celebrates two years of publication, we're pleased to give you, our loyal online community, the gift of an even more user-friendly web site, RH Reality Check 3.0! If you are a regular who wisely bookmarked us and starts each day on our front page, you've already seen the great new design that allows access to more content, diverse features and a cleaner, flash-ier look. If you haven't bookmarked us yet or don't visit our front page daily, this is a great time to set up your RSS Feed for our site or your favorite section, writers, podcasts, or comments. If you're reading this and still seeing the same web site you saw last week, clear your cache to get a fresh url from the internet.

Back to Our Roots

When we launched in May 2006, RH Reality Check was a blog. With this redesign, we're taking one of the 2007 reader survey's favorites, our Real Time posts, and creating the Real Time Blog. You'll be able to see the most recent Real Time Blog posts -- short, newsy, sometimes even pithy -- on the front page, along with all the great feature stories, analysis, op-eds and essays from our growing list of writers. As with our entire front page, just click the section headline to see more content from the Real Time blog.

Free and Civil Speech

RH Reality Check has maintained an open commenting policy on some of the most personal and controversial issues of our time, often leading to less than civil speech from the anti-choice crowd who stop by for a dose of reality. We do this because most anti-choice sites loathe free speech, deny pluralism and control conversations by excluding views they don't agree with. We believe people looking for information on these issues should see the dialog and make up their own minds. With our new design enhancements, when our online community sees comments from anti-choice voices that go beyond differences of opinion into personal attacks or stigmatization of others, you can click on "report comment" to flag it for our attention. We'll continue to embrace free and civil speech liberally because we know when voters have the facts, progressive ideas win. So we may not delete everything you think we should, but by getting more feedback we will establish better community standards.

Sharing Progressive Ideas

RH Reality Check's mission is to promote progressive ideas about sexual and reproductive health and counter the unscientific, ideological misinformation that comes from the far-right echo chamber-er-er-er-er. Americans are taking it upon themselves to learn more about issues this
election cycle -- and RH Reality Check is making it easier for you to
share ideas and substantive information about these fundamental human
rights issues. Now you can take a more active role by sharing the content you love with your friends on social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, Digg, Stumble Upon, and other networks. Just click the "Share this" icon at the top or bottom of each post and share or email your favorite posts in just two easy steps. Join our Facebook Fan Page and watch for information about our upcoming online book club conversations, or if you're involved in other social networking communities you think RH Reality Check should be part of, let us know. We welcome virtual volunteers committed to extending the reach of this important content.

Moving Progressive Ideas Farther, Faster

In addition to what we can do together with social networking sites, RH Reality Check is moving our content to many other publications, promoting the idea that all progressive publications should look closer at the fundamental human rights issues of sexual and reproductive health. Our content is routinely picked up by Salon and by Alternet's recently created Reproductive Justice and Gender section. Our partnerships with One World.net, the Media Consortium, our New Journalist Fellows program in collaboration with the Center for Independent Media all are working to increase online access to reality-based information. Soon we'll be announcing a new content partnership with Ms. Magazine, and featuring news content in collaboration with the National Partnership for Women and Families. Google recognizes RH Reality Check as a vetted source of news and analysis -- making all reality-based, comprehensive sexual and reproductive health information on our site more accessible. We are increasingly cited in mainstream media (or used by them without proper credit) and we've published op-eds based on our online content.

We're Honored

Being recognized as the Best Electronic Forum dealing with population issues in 2007, and as a Webby Honoree in the Political Blog category in 2008, makes us honored, and humbled by the challenge to keep improving. Many of the changes we're making are the result of our 2007 Readers Survey, which we took to heart. Thanks for taking the time to share your ideas for improving the site -- another survey will be coming this summer.

We're Easy

We're not that hard to work with either. We're getting interesting pitches (email emily@rhrealitycheck.org with your short pitch) from organizations, writers, thinkers, and submissions from diverse perspectives. Our small staff works hard to cover as many issues as possible, from unique perspectives, but our reality is that RH Reality Check is only as good as the online community who reads and contributes to it. Make us part of your media plan with advance copies (we honor embargoes), or by blogging from conferences, or reporting on field work you do at home or globally. We love video, have great podcast interviews each week, and are open to good, timely ideas. So if we're not covering something we should, let us know. Got a good idea, let us know. Think we got something wrong (or maybe right), let us know. We're easy, but in the most respectful and responsible way.

We're Growing

All this great content means nothing if it is only being read by people who agree with us already or if we're not growing. As mentioned above, we move content from RH Reality Check to many other locations and sites, so it is impossible to track how far and wide the content actually reaches. We do know that we have a steady and increasing audience routinely reading RH Reality Check as a primary source, growing by 360 percent in our first year of operation and 475 percent in our just completed second year. Our goal for 2008 is to double the size of our community by June, and to do that again (plus another 25 percent) by December, and we're on track to meet those goals.

We're Voting

Based on record breaking turnout, registration and participation in all aspects of this historic primary season, it seems everyone is caught up in the latest trend - voting! That makes the evidence-based, scientific, common-sense and reality-centered content of our expert writers more important than ever. Your role in using this content to educate and inform people to the dangers of continuing on purely ideological paths, at the local, state and federal level, is crucial. No election has ever been more important. Never has change been so palpable. Never have so many people been awake to the ways in which social conservatives have held our democracy hostage. Never have the threats to our rights, liberties and democracy been so clear. We won't endorse or promote candidates, but we will cover the issues important to reality-based policies on sexual and reproductive health, and like you and millions of other pro-reality voters, we will vote in numbers too big to ignore.

Thank you!

We love what we do, even on the challenging days, so thank you for working with us to continue building RH Reality Check, together!