I’m a little late to this party, but John Brummett has officially rejected Kristin Fisher’s request to appear on the Daily Debrief, a public affairs program that is part of KATV’s new online venture “Choose Your News.”

Max Brantley of the Arkansas Times has this reasoned response on his blog. He thinks Brummett ought to appear on Fisher’s program when Brumett’s blog gets up and running, whenever that may be.

Over at The Arkansas Project funnyman David Kinkade wonders, “why the reactionary dismissiveness against other media practitioners who, like him, are simply trying out new innovations in an effort to find the way forward in this new media terrain? It’s puzzling.”

For what it’s worth, in the UK BBC has embraced the value that viewer input has on how they cover the news. Earlier this year, Peter Horrocks, head of the BBC Newsroom, led a massive re-organization of the way news was collected and reported. In a speech to the University of Leeds’ Institute of Communication Studies he said, “All of the key daily news teams in radio, TV and the web will be seated alongside each other next to the people who run the newsgathering. And close to the middle of that operation will be our User Generated Content unit. It will be right alongside the newsgathering teams that deploy our conventional journalistic resources. And the UGC team will be deploying and receiving our unconventional journalistic resources – information and opinion from the audience.”

He continued: “There is little doubt of the enormous value of audience-provided information and media in enhancing the coverage of news events. From the earliest days of audience-based journalism we have been astonished at the range of the BBC News website’s ability to garner news from the most obscure corners of the globe.”

More specifically, BBC solicits opinion that directly impacts the way they cover a story. Horrocks notes, “We can actively ask questions of our audience that can build a rapid picture of unfolding events.”

Thanks to the use of Twitter, e-mail, text messaging and online public forums the BBC can “have an extremely rich range of responses from the audience. That gives us quotes we can use and interviewees we can put on air who have germane real life experiences. Often those experiences challenge or contradict the assumptions that news decision makers or the people who traditionally generate news might hold,” he said.

But he argues that caution should be exercised. “We cannot just take the views that we receive via e-mails and texts and let them dictate our agenda. Nor should they give us a slant around which we should orient our take on a story. At their best they are an invaluable information resource and an important corrective to group-think.”

But all of this clearly helps expand the audience. According to Horrocks, “the greater accessibility that audience interaction offers is attractive to audiences beyond those that contribute directly. And there is evidence that it encourages people to stay longer, clicking around a site.”

UPDATE: Fisher’s response to Mr. Brummett.