I haven't seen this feature before. Pete Clifton, editor of the BBC Online, ends the week with a note to readers, plus an invitation to drop him a line.

An excerpt:

We had a busy weekend, with Spain in the spotlight as the first country to hold a referendum on the European constitution. There was bags of coverage across the BBC, of course, and not surprisingly one of our Spanish stories was top of the page impressions statistics when they arrived on Monday morning.

Unfortunately for Europhiles, our top story on Sunday was the birth in Spain of the Beckhams' third son (Beckhams celebrate birth of Cruz), while our lead story on the Spanish referendum came in fourth (Spain voters approve EU charter).

One of the delights of working on the news site is getting the stats the next day. Quite sobering too - we can all be focused on the weighty stuff, and we suddenly get nutmegged by Beckham.

We can't base all our decisions on these stats, of course, or we'd be leading with cute animals, space rockets and "bad" weather every day. But they keep us in touch. We give a hint of these stats each day on the NewsWatch site, but I am planning to be much more up front about them later in the year. In the meantime, this column will keep you in the know.

Without working at the Beeb, I can't say how candid or not Clifton is being.

Many attempts at having a dialogue with readers are transparent PR efforts. One has to ask what the point of that is.

The test for Mr. Clifton's column will come when something really blows up on his watch.

My guess is people are getting reasonably savvy about interpreting corporatespeak. If you engage it in as an attempt to shore up your credibility, you'll end up undermining it.