Jumping the gun: The message behind premature reports of Paterno's death

By Adam Cancryn

What we learned from the premature reports of Joe Paterno's death.

It took one mistake for it all to come crumbling down this year in State College, Pa.

That was the case for the late Joe Paterno, and it was doubly true for the journalists that spent the past several months unearthing the story behind Jerry Sandusky, Paterno and the rest of the do-nothing crew at Penn State. For despite all their stellar work, the media that descended on the football-crazed college town will never escape their one, final, whopper of an error.

It will likely take years, even decades, to fully unravel what went wrong at Penn State, but within a day we knew exactly how multiple news outlets came to report Paterno's death roughly 12 hours too early. Local news site Onward State originated the false report, based on a document later revealed as a hoax. CBSSports.com and the Huffington Post got duped by that report, and by the infectious power of Internet, so did most everyone else in the sports world. Just hours after the Paterno family debunked the story, the axe would fall on Onward State managing editor Devon Edwards.

Poynter has what is perhaps the definitive blow-by-blow account of what went down that night, and I'd encourage you to take a look to get an idea of how the incredibly damaging sausage got made. But nearly a week removed from the incident, it's now important to understand what both the journalism world and its readers can take away from it.

The more things change, the more they stay the same

You hear it constantly: the media landscape is shifting, traditional journalism is dead, the industry no longer holds the power, etc. And while there is some merit to all that professorial hand wringing, it exists largely on the financial side of the ledger, not the creative side.

Whether a reporter is working for a newspaper, a TV station or online outlet, the fundamentals still apply. Find trustworthy sources, get information from them, verify that information is true, and then verify it again. Check it out until there's no doubt the story is correct. Then you publicize it. That's the process, and it won't change no matter publishing platform.

In fact, I'd argue that Twitter and the various other online sharing tools have made the fundamentals more important than ever before. Sources can more easily misrepresent themselves over e-mail, Gchat, Facebook and the like. Twitter can't even properly verify celebrities at times. Photoshop means documents and images can be doctored or simply created out of thin air, and the convoluted games of telephone that play out across several social platforms can turn outlandish rumor into fact within minutes.

Onward State fell prey to all of those pitfalls, despite what was solid reporting in a traditional sense. It followed the developing story throughout the day, stayed in touch with previously reliable contacts and then held off on releasing the news until it had "verified" its information with two sources. All by the book, yet all woefully inadequate. In a online world where something as basic as identity is ambiguous and malleable, hard-copy documents, face-to-face meetings and extensive fact-checking must become the norm, especially when the story is this big.

Authority multiplies

Onward State's erroneous tweet that Paterno had died was retweeted more than 212 times (one of those was mine) in the hour and 15 minutes of its existence. I couldn't track down a screen shot of the subsequent CBS Sports tweet, but given its nearly 54,000 followers, there is no doubt it reached a far wider audience. And with every reiteration, the story gained more authority. Not inclined to believe Onward State, a local site run by college journalists? Okay, well how about now that CBS Sports has it too? If not them, how about The Huffington Post? Or one of your many friends and family who saw the story and then relayed it to you? At some point, sheer numbers will drown out the skepticism.

Thanks to these online platforms, anyone can break news about anything. That's as it should be; informing the masses shouldn't be a privilege hoarded by capital-J Journalism organizations merely because they have tenure. Everyone has valuable information, and now there are outlets to share that information. Even when actor Robe Lowe tweeted that Peyton Manning wouldn't return to the Indianapolis Colts, a small part of you had to consider whether, just maybe, he had some special insight (all signs indicate he didn't).

Yet with that freedom must come a healthy dose of skepticism. Media outlets have to do some independent investigating before passing on another's story, and readers should do the same. As we learned with CBS Sports, that's just as true for big-time outlets as it is for smaller shops.

When it hits the fan, come clean immediately

Pre-internet, there was a predictable progression for errors. The falsehood was published, readers called to alert the publication of the falsehood, and a correction would run in small type the next day. If the error was big enough, you might get nasty letters and phone calls for a few days.

That's no longer the case. Feedback is quick, the outcry is magnified and the damage to the publication and the public trust is more severe. Corrections must now be immediate and conspicuous, and coupled with transparency over how the mistake came about.

It's here where the story of Jan. 21 takes a bit of a twist. Both Onward State and CBS Sports deleted their original tweets announcing Paterno's death, bad form when it comes to Twitter etiquette but somewhat defensible if they were trying to limit the blast radius.

Onward State, which had tweeted, "Our sources can now confirm, Joseph Vincent Paterno has passed away at the age of 85," retracted it with two follow-up messages: "To OS followers: Our 8:45 pm tweet about Joe Paterno's death appears to be inaccurate according to @JayPaterno, who says he's alive. ... We were confident when we ran with it, and are still trying to figure out where our process failed. We apologize sincerely for the error."

CBS Sports, meanwhile, originally said, "Joe Paterno has died at the age of 85." Once the story was proven false, it followed with, "Paterno family spokesman denies @OnwardState report that Joe Paterno has passed."

The difference between the two outlets is subtle, but important. Onward State ran a story based on its own reporting, then took full responsibility when it realized it was mistaken.

CBS Sports, on the other hand, ran what appeared to be its own report on Paterno's death. In fact, it had simply taken Onward State's story and plugged it into its own, without attribution on Twitter and with minimal credit (an in-story link that didn't mention Onward State by name) on its site.

Then, on top of appropriating a publication's story as its own and taking the credit, it shoveled the blamed onto that same publication when the story turned out not to be true. In subsequent statements, CBS Sports has refused to apologize for its reporting, saying only that it was sorry for running "an unsubstantiated report."

The outcry over the ethical breach has been swift and absolutely on target. One journalist wondered whether CBS Sports would have ever bothered to properly credit Onward State if the report turned out to be true (it probably wouldn't have), and the outlet has received a beating since then from those both within and outside of the journalism industry. As Onward State penned a heartfelt letter taking full responsibility for the story and explaining in brutal detail each step of the process that led up to the report, CBS a day later interviewed the virtual E*TRADE baby on national television without bothering to disclose on air its advertising relationship with the company.

The two outlets' reactions teach us two things. First is that big doesn't mean better anymore. Just as Onward State was first to publish, it was also first to take responsibility. It handled the fallout as best as could be expected, then put its head down and and got back to work repairing its relationship with its readership. CBS Sports passed the buck, then stuck its head in the sand so everyone could see the message tattooed on its ass that said, "We made $703 million in profits last quarter, what do we care about a few angry readers?"

It also reinforced the concept that how an organization responds in a time of crisis will shape how it's ultimately perceived. Onward State and Devon Edwards did all it could to make amends, and that's been greeted by a significant amount of gratitude and support. Maybe it lost a few readers, but it certainly strengthened its ties with those that are left. Most importantly, it established itself in the succeeding days as a truly professional organization.

CBS went on to congratulate itself over a fake baby interview. There is no indication anyone was fired, disciplined or even given a stern talking-to about the entire Paterno situation.

Jan. 21's momentous error is, for now, an unfortunate coda on the Penn State story. Journalists will continue to dig into what happened there, and the sting of the premature reporting will inevitably fade into the fabric of the greater story. While it's still fresh and painful, though, we should learn from it, if at least to remind ourselves that no matter the the situation or medium, any story must first be built on the perpetual pillars of truth and accountability.

Adam Cancryn is an editor and co-founder of Began in '96.