After reading about News.com enabling trackbacks and pings for online stories a few weeks ago, I have been thinking about the various feedback mechanisms bloggers have, and what local reporters have.

With most of the major blogging software any blogger can receive feedback in a number of ways:

Stats
Traditional web server stats, via your server or a service such as SiteMeter, allow a blogger to know basic information about how many readers they may have (i.e. readership/circulation). Stats will let you know page views, session lengths, referrals, search phrases, etc.

Comments
One of the more powerful tools of the blog. Anybody (in most cases) can provide a comment about what you have written. A conversation begins. In some cases a comment may provide a correction, or more information on the subject.

TrackBacks/Links
TrackBacks allow the blogger to know who is linking to their blog. In a sense a blogger can begin to see what type of influence they have on the blogosphere. A-List bloggers often have up to a hundred or more trackbacks for a single post. That's influence.

The more impact you have the more comments, TrackBacks and visitors.

So that's what a blogger has, and now the reporters at News.com. They can quickly see what impact their story is having, correct any errors, or perhaps add new facets based upon reader feedback.

What does the traditional local newspaper repoter have? I asked a long-time friend, Barry Friedman, who works in the newspaper industry (The Ledger). Here is his answer:

Most of the feedback mechanism a reporter has are very subjective: How interested is his editor in the story? What kind of play did it get? Is anybody calling or e-mailing him or his editor about it? Is the story generating any buzz in the community? Are his editors looking for a followup?

Reporters may know the circulation of the printed product, but they'll never know how many readers they had in print. On the web side, I do not think that many writers have access to, or review the web stats for their stories. Barry's comments:

I do send out a list of the 25 most-viewed articles each month, but some of those just reflect what's been linked by Fark or Drudge. And some reporters make it a point to look at the daily list of 10 most-viewed stories from the previous day, but that list has the same limitations.

In some ways syndication is a bit like a TrackBack, if another paper picks up a story the reporter would know about this. Is News.com starting a trend by enabling TrackBacks? Barry's thoughts:

Some newspapers are following the Slashdot/CNET model of including a feedback forum at the bottom of each story. Usually when I see these at daily newspaper sites, though, nobody bothered to start a forum.

I do think that newspaper sites will be moving more to the conversation model than the authoritative voice model. Readers will begin expecting it. Could be in blog form, or maybe we'll come up with another way to engage the reader in a conversation.

I agree with Barry about the forums. So many times I visit the forum section of a local paper, and find very little going on. Perhaps general readers would prefer a simple comment form, over the structure of a web forum.

The unkown for now is how much e-mail/comments a writer receives for an article. Only the writer knows this. Any reporters out there? Can you tell me what's the most feedback you've ever received for a story? What's average? Has a comment a reader left you provided another angle to the story which you persued?

It will be interesting to watch over the next few years as papers begin to adopt the conversation model.