Thanks to Simon Wakerman who wrote a post about an interesting new site called NewsCounter that is billed as "an impartial service that allows organizations to respond to media coverage and the public the chance to judge two sides of the story." 

Fascinating concept that creates a sort of dialogue between organization > media outlet > organization again > audience and employs, for better or worse, a sort of mass, self-correcting wikipedia style of editing (in this case not an entry but an article, idea, issue, concept, dialogue).     

I love that this provides another way for an audience to actively engage in creating news as opposed to strictly passively consumping it.  'Prosumers' in Don Tapscott's Wikinomics lexicon.   

And, there's an underlying measurement element here that speaks to audience opinion and helps to take the story from a simple output metric (there was a story) to a slightly more useful outtake (what do people think?) metric.   

Each story encourages readers to vote on whether they were more convinced by the original media report or the organization's response to it.  I was surprised to see how often readers indicated they were more convinced by the organization's response. 

Two methodological cautions, however. 

1.  One can see the results of readers that have already voted.  Might this affect your vote? 

2.  In one rare instance in which the vote was evenly split, I voted in favour of the organization's response just to see what would happen.  The results changed from 50%/50% to 33%/67% (organization).  So, not many voters evidently.  In fact, unless I've missed it, the site doesn't show the reader how many votes there were.