Of all the changes to the website, that was the one that affected me most. It always seemed that the beefiest stories were there — the ones I was inclined to remember — even if I looked more often at the parade of breaking news on the front page.

Of course, that link simply let me read the “print” stories online. But I felt more informed, knowing I had read the stories the editors, considering the space restrictions in a print edition, thought were most important that day. In a time before there were social media interaction statistics, the role of the editor was significant.

A study presented this month by three University of Oregon researchers provides further evidence in a growing body of research suggesting that readers pay attention to the agenda-setting function exercised by editors. The authors, Santana, Livingstone and Cho, conclude in their paper that: “Print news readers remember significantly more news stories than online news readers.”

Specifically, they suggest that the choice readers have online to follow their own interest leaves them less able to gauge a story’s significance.

They state:

Online newspapers are apt to give fewer cues about the news story’s importance, thus giving readers more control over story selection. In this way, part of the agenda-setting function of the newspaper is lost in the online version.

“Wisdom of the crowds” logic would suggest that readers can compensate for the weakened influence of editors by using other readers’ reactions in social media as a guide. For example, they could use the numbers of Facebook Likes, retweets and comments visible in a story’s social media toolbar to gauge story importance.

However, this appears not to have been a major factor in the current research.

Why? It might be because the news source used in the test was the New York Times, chosen by the researchers because it “has historically offered content that is considered trustworthy, complete and balanced” and it was likely to be familiar to students.

However, relative to many mainstream news sources, the Times offers weak reporting of story interaction statistics. Only the number of comments appear on a typical story like this one — and the number isn’t prominent on the page.

Take a look at this LA Times story, which has a more active social media toolbar at the top of the story reporting retweets, shares, comments and Facebook Recommends. The Huffington Post reports social media statistics even more prominently on its stories.

The influence of one’s own social media network is likely to be a great influence as well. Seeing a story retweeted and commented upon by one’s peers is bound to affect the reader’s assessment of its importance. So, comparing print and online stories in isolation from their social context may be an increasingly inadequate way of assessing importance or recall.

It will be insightful to see a study conducted using more integration with social media to see if the influence of readers’ peers is as significant as that of editors’.

The answer would have been a easy a few years ago: the headline, of course. It’s the link people click on and the words they search for. But as social media becomes more integrated with content, the author is becoming a more important part of a web page.

Forbes.com announced last week a re-designed article page that displays an author’s bio, social media presence and past posts much more prominently. It also introduced a so-called Comment Strip below the headline that “more deeply integrates the content creator’s community on the page” by showing thumbnails of commenters’ avatars.

Take a look at this article by Meghan Casserly. The  author’s name and a brief bio are above the headline — a rare thing for a news publication. The right-hand sidebar contains an extended bio of Casserly and highlights from her recent discussions with commenters.

Forbes is betting that the future of digital journalism lies in transactions with readers and that those discussions will lead to better journalism. Mathew Ingram made the same point yesterday in his post Memo to newspapers: The future of media is a two-way street.

Is the Casserly page more about her or her story on interview questions? The answer isn’t obvious.

Forbes is, in essence, moving away from the concept of a standalone story on its site and toward the idea of a story being part of the author’s ongoing stream of content.

Google had a related idea with its Living Stories experiment that ended last year — but it completely missed the social media aspect to journalism. Its partnership with the Washington Post and the New York Times attempted to create topic pages that were updated automatically with new developments. But the new content was created only by journalists.

Two years later, leading-edge publishers are trusting that reporters — and their audience — can supply content that is at least as important as the original story itself.

Google began displaying author names in search results in 2009. Last month it released authorship markup tools that aim to link related content to individual authors. The next step would be to link social media discussions to the same authors.

The path itself leads toward a future of the author as brand — a brand perhaps at least as important as the publication itself.

Jenkins, a journalism and cinematic arts professor at the University of Southern California, makes a blunt statement about the relevance of news in the social media age: “If it doesn’t spread, it’s dead.”

Obvious? Perhaps. His point is that news organizations need to better understand how — and why — people take content and re-package it for others. He likens the transaction to a bottle of wine you buy at a store then give to your dinner host. You might put the wine into a decorative bag and tell the cook a story about how you thought of her when you chose that label and vintage.

We bought it as a commodity, we give it as a gift, and the moment of transformation comes when we remove the price tag. We need to better understand the same transformation as consumers take content from commercial sites and circulate it via Twitter or Facebook to their communities.

When people spread content to their social networks, they edit it and add comments to frame it for a specific social purpose. Others might re-mix the content and mash it up — think the Donald Duck and Glenn Beck mashup and, in Canada, Rick Mercer’s Photo Challenge. Sure, these are lighthearted examples. But as Jenkins points out, people make sharing decisions based on the “social or sentimental value of the content.”

I’m reminded of the New York Times’ excellent interactive last week “Budget Puzzle: You Fix the Budget.” It didn’t provide the tools for a mashup, per se. But it promoted participation — a social experience that people could share with their friends, something people apparently did on Twitter more than 11,000 times.

Jenkins argues news organizations have to be able to meet people in their conversations: ”Journalists need to know how they fit into those circuits.”

However, according to Mathew Ingram, even on new platforms such as the iPad, news organizations are lagging in promoting sharable content. Publishers, he argues, seem to be “hoping that you will forget all about the Internet and social media and all of those irritating things that get in between you and the consumption of their wonderful content.”

Jenkins refers to a “constant tension” in the news business between “meter access” and “spreadability.” We can see it in the New York Times’ persistent plan to erect a metered paywall in early 2011, even while being fully cognizant of the power of social media. Jenkins would seem to be skeptical of the Times’ chances in restraining the social nature of the Internet:

News sites which prevent the sharing of such content amongst readers may look like ways to protect the commercial interest of that content, but in fact, they kill it, destroying its value as a cultural resource within networked communities, and insuring that the public will look elsewhere for news that can be spread.”

What to do for the rest of us? A good starting point might be Rohit Bhargava’s 5 New Rules Of Social Media Optimization, which offers tools for getting your content more frequently included social media conversations.

There are two elements worth noting:

1. It sets out a standard for publishing information gleaned from social media that news staff may not be able to verify. In “exceptional circumstances” governed by “timeliness or if it is in the public interest,” editorial staff may publish user-generated content such as tweets, Facebook posts, YouTube videos or photos. The kicker is that “we are clear with the audience about what we know.” This is an important acknowledgement that the CBC will be visible when important events emerge from social media in real-time, without compromising the news organization’s commitment to verification. It suggests that events can happen so quickly in social media that journalists sometimes need to make their process of verification public — a conclusion contained in a set of guidelines I co-authored for the Canadian Association of Journalists on “Re-Tweeting or Re-Posting Information Found In Social Media.”
2. It makes a statement about personal use of social media, acknowledging the danger that “personal opinions on controversial subjects” can “erode the trust of our audience.” True enough. However, it states that personal social media activity must conform to the CBC’s social media principles, whose guiding rule is not to publish anything in social media that wouldn’t go on the air or the news site. This is simply too restrictive and doesn’t acknowledge how people actually use social media — especially in their personal lives. Applying the “publishing” standard to social media use has the effect of hammering down whimsy, spontaneity and experimentation, in short: personality — the key driver of “social” in social media.

Here’s the issue in a nutshell: the very first statement of social media principles declares that Twitter, Facebook or flickr “can be useful tools for gathering information, as well as disseminating it.” What about sharing, engaging and receiving feedback? “Dissemination” sounds like 20th-century broadcasting. “Gathering” sounds like “taking.”

According to Esther Enkin, executive editor of CBC News, this document took “nearly two years of work.” In some ways, the social media section feels like it was authored in 2008. It lacks practical guidelines for the kind of interacting it is encouraging its reporters to take on.

In all, there is much to admire here and Enkin’s commitment to making this a “living document” offers the promise of adapting the document as social media practices evolve.

If you’re a journalist over 35, an employer likely told you not to post campaign signs on your lawn, attend public rallies or sport bumper stickers. The advice was meant to portray you — and your employer — as independent and without bias.

But online media challenge that perspective. Social media advocates argue that trying to separate one’s personal and professional lives online is a lost cause. Journalist and community engagement advocate Steve Buttry argues: “Most of the Twitter world mixes business with pleasure. Building walls means you won’t understand how Twitter works.”

Others argue that revealing one’s assumptions and values publicly is a badge of integrity. According to media researcher and consultant David Weinberger, “transparency is the new objectivity.”

Can the perception of objectivity be achieved in the age of social media?

• What guidelines should journalists follow in maintaining personal blogs?
• Should they care who they friend or follow on Facebook and Twitter?
• What about joining social media groups or accepting badges for participation?

What do you think?

One, who was using the tool to announce new content, said audience engagement was still minimal. Another said they were unclear as to how the organization was tracking any benefit from their effort.

A new study released July 20 suggests the news outlet could benefit substantially by better focusing and communicating its social media strategy — getting more reporters involved and encouraging them to become more personal.

The study found a financial correlation between companies that outperform their peers and those that strongly engage people across multiple channels of social media. It didn’t look specifically at news media organizations but its recommendations would seem to apply widely — especially since it found that media and technology companies were, on average, involved in the most social media channels.

The study is authored by social media analyst Charlene Li of the Altimeter Group in collaboration with social publishing platform Wetpaint. The researchers found:

Social media engagement and financial success work together to perpetuate a healthy business cycle: a customer-oriented mindset stemming from deep social interaction allows a company to identify and meet customer needs in the marketplace, generating superior profits.

The top scorers in the study — Starbucks, Dell … and Thomson Reuters — all engaged the audience on multiple platforms. But the researchers also concluded that focusing heavily on just a few channels can be effective.

The study listed a number of take-away points. One of the key ones was:

Social media is no longer the responsibility of a few people in the organization. Instead, it’s important for everyone across the organization to engage with customers in the channels that make sense — a few minutes each day spent by every employee adds up to a wealth of customer touch points.

So, it suggests that while social media editors are important, to become truly effective, news outlets need to spread those tasks much more broadly.

David Schlesinger said in a speech to the International Olympics Committee Press Commission that London 2012 will be covered by “Twitterers sitting in the stadium banging out the result in a Tweet from their mobile phone.” (2012?)

He called on organizers to step back from their hard-line policy on the issue: “It means working with the mobile phone and digital camera and media-enabled public, and not against them.”

The Vancouver organizing committee for the 2010 Winter Games is prohibiting spectators from:

Broadcasting or recording through the use of cellular phones or other recording or transmitting devices (e.g., two-way radios, recording devices, PDAs, or video cameras), use of flash photography or other lighting devices (e.g., laser pens, etc.)

In addition, it decrees that “spectators must consent to being inspected for prohibited and restricted items” while explicitly stating it will not provide storage for seized items.

The restrictions reflect the attitude in February 2005 when Bell Globemedia and Rogers Communications Inc. paid a record US$153 million for the Canadian rights to both the 2010 Winter Games and the 2012 Summer Games.

Ivan Fecan, Globemedia’s president and chief executive officer, told the Globe and Mail (one of its properties): “By 2012, we think there will be so much digital proliferation in the country that there will be opportunities in all of these platforms that we haven’t even thought of. And that doesn’t even deal with what might be available from mobile video and other applications.”

The assumption then was the companies could cash in on a broadcast monopoly in a wireless environment. But that was before Twitter and Facebook — and the iPhone.