• by Wendy Davis , Staff Writer @wendyndavis, August 9, 2007

Google News has started soliciting feedback from people mentioned in articles that appear in the mainstream media.

The company revealed its plans Tuesday, in its Google News blog. "We'll be trying out a mechanism for publishing comments from a special subset of readers: those people or organizations who were actual participants in the story in question," the post states.

For example, some newspapers this week reported on a study claiming that McDonald's packaging and brand names affect 4-year-olds' food preferences. Google News not only displays the stories about the study, but also separately displays comments by Dr. Vic Strasburger, M.D., professor of pediatrics, University of New Mexico, who had been quoted in some of the original articles, and Walt Riker, vice president, McDonald's Corporate Communications. The idea of allowing subjects, experts and other interested parties to comment on news stories is nothing new -- nor is soliciting such feedback. In fact, it sounds remarkably like the vision former AOL exec Jason Calacanis had for Netscape.com, when he refashioned it as a collaborative news site last year. At the time, he hired around two dozen full- and part-time "anchors" to scrutinize articles submitted to the site and contact subjects for additional comment.

Still, Google's decision to run comments adjacent to the news stories seems certain to exacerbate the tension between the company and its mainstream media frenemies. Regardless of Google's actual motives, some view the move as showing a distrust of the mainstream media -- or at least a suspicion that newspapers aren't giving readers extensive enough information.

On the other hand, the move also can be viewed as yet another way of enabling regular consumers, those without access to a printing press, to create their own media -- a strategy Google has long favored via its free blog creator, free photo-sharing service and the recently acquired YouTube.