False reports are lessons learned

The inaccurate reports of former Penn State football coach Joe Paterno's death on Saturday night originated at the student news site Onward State, then rapidly disseminated throughout social media in now-typical fashion.

Before long, sites like Huffington Post and CBS Sports repeated the false report, failing to verify its accuracy or even credit Onward State by name initially in their coverage.

The incident was the latest of online media's blunders, similar to the false NPR report of the death of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in the shooting in Tuscon, Ariz., last January, which was also spread on Twitter by Huffington Post and CNN. It is what Glenn Greenwald called a "media orgy of rumors, speculation and falsehoods" in a post on Salon, which was critical of the confused and conflicting reports surrounding the Fort Hood shooting in November 2009.

In the hyperactive rumor mill of social media, journalists searching for notoriety – the prize of breaking that big story – can easily get burned for not seeking verification and striving for objectivity if the story turns out inaccurate. In a post on Poynter.org about the false reports on Paterno's death reports, Craig Silverman talked about the journalist's quest for glory and the risk online media's participants take for relatively little reward when it's all said and done.

"Journalists need to do a better job calculating the risk of being first, rather than focusing on the benefit," Silverman wrote. "How many people would have recalled — or cared — that Onward State broke the news?"

If Onward State had accurately reported his death on Sunday morning when Paterno's family made the announcement, the student news site would have been largely overlooked and drowned out by the national media. Instead, the publication must live through all this negative attention, the angry retweets, the apologetic resignation of the managing editor – it probably wasn't worth it.

Not long ago, in a January 2010 Chronicle of Higher Education story, Onward State was recognized as an "unruly news blog" capable of rivaling Penn State's independent print newspaper, The Daily Collegian. But stories like this show that journalism's relentless pursuit toward truth must continue in the transition from print to digital media, or else all credibility is lost.

And the entirety of the blame isn't on the student news site either. National web publications like CBS Sports should exercise more responsibility before republishing a potentially false report to tens of thousands of Twitter followers.

We also can't forget the journalists who got this story right. At the Associated Press, editors applied a lesson learned during the Giffords coverage and agreed that "any Paterno death report needed to be confirmed by AP's own reporting and sources on the ground," according to a story at Poyter.org.

Journalists must learn from these missteps to properly adapt in this brave new world of social media.