The story that has so far received the greatest number of visitors on Lansing Online News is the one posted this morning about these two logos.

I was browsing the campus newspaper’s website last night when I spotted a brief article about the upcoming switch and decided to blog about how this had a touched a nerve on campus more than almost anything in recent memory.

Jacob Carpenter, the editor of the campus paper The State News, happened to be a guest lecturer in my Intro to Mass Media class this morning. At one point, I asked him how they had broken the story. “We didn’t,” he said. Turns out the first mention of the switch occurred on SpartanTailgate.com’s forum. One of the Booth Newspaper chain’s publications had picked it from there, and that’s where a State Newser spotted it.

Maybe I am guilty of overreacting, but the fact that the campus paper was the third to post the news – and a fan forum was first – seems to me a metaphor for how the news business is changing.

Even more telling perhaps is that the poll on the SpartanTailgate site about which logo fans prefer currently has 428 voters, while the State News site poll has 4,495, so being first doesn’t always mean generating the greatest number of hits.

But the Facebook fan page called The Old Spartan logo has 12,368 members, with more added every moment. (And it is one of three Facebook fan pages and two groups formed in the past 24 hours.)

What does this mean? The first thing we learn is that a story can break anywhere. I polled the 100+ students in my class this morning and almost all had already heard about the logo controversy. It erupted out of the fan site and into the ether. It doesn’t really matter where the story comes from today – unless you are the newspaper who needs the hits to survive.

It also means the real action for young people is on Facebook. News sites serve up information that some students will consume, but once the meme goes viral, literally thousands of young people go to Facebook to hold conversations and to take action. Again, this has implications for building a news site business model around selling ads based on clicks.

The key, it would seem, is to ensure your site becomes part of the info loop that intersects social media such as Facebook and Twitter. And if you cannot be first, you had better be the best, the most trusted or the most entertaining.

NOTE: One of the biggest differences between traditional media and new media is the failure to link. The State News’ piece does not include a link to SpartanTailgate or to the Booth paper where they saw the initial piece. It is part of the conventional newsroom ethos that you don’t give credit to the publication that scooped you.

The convention in the blogosphere, however, is to link to the primary source and all other sources. Readers want to be able to see for themselves that you accurately stated what the other stories are saying or to see if there is more information. And somehow in this era, the refusal to acknowledge the work of others not only seems arrogant but badly out of date.