In an August 22, 2007 article on the San Francisco Chronicle website, staff writer Joe Garofoli writes about a Bay Area news station that's experimenting with online chats between an anchor and her audience during their 5 p.m. newscast.Garofoli writes: Tired of yelling vainly at the television screen when the local news anchor says something infuriating? Bay Area news station NBC11 now is enabling viewers to vent in real time - letting them converse with its anchor while she's on the air. Sort of. Viewers might not get a personal note back from anchor Jessica Aguirre, but they could get an on-air shout-out during the 5 p.m. newscast or a response from her in the newscast's online chat room. The San Jose station started anchor-driven online chats this month in an effort to better interact with its audience. The experiment is an example of how mainstream media outlets are belatedly trying to embrace a fundamental value of the Web: Listen to your audience. Google News decided recently to allow comments on the stories it distributes. Online news outlets and newspapers, including The Chronicle, now encourage readers to directly post comments on reported pieces. The traditionally reported news story isn't the informational cul-de-sac it long has been. Mainstream news outlets realize that their reporting is just the start of a larger conversation that sprawls through the Internet long after the original journalism appears. Instead of watching conversations started by mainstream outlets scatter to blogs, more traditional media are trying to corral some of that online discussion on their own sites and create new programming features. "News is shifting from being a prepared lecture from a journalist to being a conversation with the audience," said Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, a media think tank. "And local TV has been very late in coming to the online party. About all the forms of media have already been there." Other TV news outlets have incorporated similar interactive elements over the past couple of years. CNN regularly responds on-air to e-mailed comments from viewers, as do local TV stations. The CBS Evening News is simulcast on its Web site, and NBC11's 5 p.m. newscast is simulcast on nbc11.com. The most interesting twist at NBC11, analysts say, is the anchor's engagement in the online chatter while she's on-air.During one recent 30-minute broadcast, Aguirre made more than half a dozen references to what was transpiring online. She encouraged the audience to "get in there" - the online chat room - and asked "What do you think?" after individual stories. During the same newscast, the station's "Fast Feedback" question of the day was whether the United States should get out of Iraq. Later, she read snippets of some of the e-mailed responses on the air... Click here for Garofoli's story in its entirety on the San Francisco Chronicle website.