Brad Marley

Late on Saturday night, the Twittersphere blew up with the news that Joe Paterno had died.

Except he didn’t.

Judging by this hashtag, it appears CBS incorrectly broke the story.

Even though his family confirmed that he did pass away a few hours later, I think it’s still worth mentioning that this speed-over-accuracy media atmosphere we are all a part of is troubling.

It’s troubling because, besides a clever hashtag, there seems to be no repercussions for spreading such an untrue story, leading most to believe that this wasn’t a big deal.

But I think it is a big deal.

Our country’s freedom of the press is something we all take for granted. A morning newspaper on the doorstep has been, for most of us, as American as baseball and Occupy Wall Street. But as social media continues its rapid ascent as our main source of news-gathering, we risk losing maybe our best source of news-gathering.

I’m talking, again, about the newspaper. (Don’t think I didn’t think about calling this post “Why We Need Newspapers, Part 2.”)

Newspapers don’t make mistakes like this. They have the luxury — yes, the luxury — of checking their facts. It’s been a long time since a print newspaper actually “broke” a story, but that’s no longer their place in the world. A successful paper must now focus on analysis. They must write the stories behind the stories that broke the night before.

That’s where they can thrive.

But I fear that the news about Paterno passing away will only serve to put this thought in our heads that newspapers should go the way of the dinosaurs.

If anything, it should make them settle in for a fight to stay relevant.

I wish there was a way to hold those accountable who mislead us to be punished, but, for now, we’ll have to let the Court of Public Opinion levy the punishment.

Our job, for those of us who are active in social media, is not to fan the flames. When we hear something shocking, it’s up to us to check our facts. Read it with a grain of salt.

Because if we don’t, we’re only fanning the flames of inaccuracy. And once we’ve made it clear that we can tolerate mistakes, there’s nothing to hold back the wave of falsity.

/end rant

Finally, the random question: I love to read, and I love to hear what others are reading. So, what is the last book you read that you couldn’t put down?

OMG! The Hunger Games series. I seriously had to tell myself to go to work and, as my reward for working the entire day, I would get to go home and read. I read all three in a week. So. Freaking. Good.

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Again – big thanks go out to Gini for taking time out of her busy schedule to answer a few questions.

You can find all entries in The Five and One series here.

If you attended a local community college after high school, didn’t it seem like an extension of high school?

Walking nervously to your first day of classes, your nerves were soothed when you recognized many faces from your graduating class, still running within the same social circle.  However, they didn’t seem to carry the same cache that they did when they ruled the proverbial roost.

That’s kind of how I feel about Google+.

When I began filling out my Circles, Google+ suggested I follow a lot of the same people who I currently follow on Twitter. Some of them well-known. In my experience, though, they’ve always seemed like they were locked in their own circle. If you didn’t have the street cred, you weren’t worth their time.

But since they’re considered people we should know, I decided to add them to my Circles and try to engage in dialogue.

Then I read a terrific article by Christopher Barger that opened up my eyes to the possibilities that lie within Google+.

Essentially, a new social network like this gives us the opportunity to start over and discover people who add true value to our networks, so I removed myself from the aforementioned Circles. (Don’t worry. They won’t even notice.)

The people who add value might be people you already know. Some are hidden, waiting to be discovered.

Just like community college, if you stick to the people who you are comfortable with, you’ll get by, but you’re not giving yourself an opportunity to fully realize your potential.

Of course, I still held on to some connections from my “Twitter days” because they are valuable to me. And, they talk back. But I refuse to add somebody just because they’re popular.

A lot of students use their two years of community college as a stepping stone to bigger and better things. Others are just there because their friends enrolled.

This is a good question to ask yourself if you’re on the Google+ train: Am I here because everybody else is? Or do I legitimately want to be a valuable member of a community?

That answer to that question will determine your success.

From a communications perspective, we have come a long way in the ten years since 9/11.

There was no Twitter. There was no iPhone. There was no Facebook. Almost every tool we use now to digest news was merely a figment of somebody’s imagination then. It makes 2001 seem downright prehistoric (and makes me feel old.)

This idea was the basis of a conversation I recently had with Kaileen Connelly, a colleague at Mullen in Detroit who falls into the “millennial” category. We were sharing our stories of how we learned the night before that bin Laden was dead, and I found hers of particular interest.

Rather than try to explain it myself, I asked her to tell her story in her own words.

Twitter became my go-to for live updates and remained the one technology to which I was glued.

I moved between word-of-mouth (Levin’s D.C. curious late-night flight) to the radio (760 WJR-AM) to my television (obnoxious CNN pundits) and to the next day’s newspaper coverage, but was reliant on my Twitter feed to hear what my “followers” thought of the developments as they unfolded.

Marshall McLuhan says that the medium is the message.  I say each medium changed the message.

Yes, each medium presented the message different, but it’s not about how the message was delivered, it was how each technology changed the message.

Here’s how it went:

Upon arriving in Detroit from Denver, Colo., I saw Senator Carl Levin (Mich-D) waiting at the Baltimore departure gate.  He was flying to D.C., but was taking the cheap flight, but late …  weird.

I tweeted it.

While walking out I heard a TSA agent talking to his wife about how he’d helped the Senator after forgetting his meds.  We started chatting, and I simultaneously saw tweets about President Obama holding a late-night Sunday press conference.  I told my new friend, and then I made a joke about the President probably announcing that we’re bombing a country or being bombed.

I tweeted it.

Anxious to hear the news, I checked my Twitter feed while being transferred to my car.  I then turned on my local AM radio station in my car.  This was not enough.  While at stops, I scanned my Twitter feed.  The news of Osama’s killing was out.

I retweeted it.

Finally, when I got home and the President still hadn’t spoken, I rushed to the T.V., busted open my laptop and waited.  CNN was blaring, HooteSuite was on fire, Facebook was quickly filling up, and my mom was blowing up my iPhone.

I watched, tweeted, facebooked, answered, and talked it.

When Scott Bartosiewicz accidentally dropped the ‘F Bomb Heard ‘Round Detroit’ on Chrysler’s Twitter account on March 9, contrary to popular belief within the walls of Twitter, the world did not end. Chrysler sales did not plummet. My mother did not sign up for a Twitter handle because of the buzz.

I would venture to say, outside of our own little Twitter world, it did not affect us, save for Scott and the unfortunate casualties of the aftershock.

But the few eagle-eyed Twitter users who did catch the errant tweet made sure it wouldn’t go quietly into the night.  They displayed the proper amount of manufactured outrage. One user even took the time to write a blog post publicizing their remarkable catch, but you can’t read the entire post anymore because the entire blog has since been marked ‘private’. [Editor's note: Weird.]

We don’t pretend to be offended when we hear somebody swear in a public place like a bar, for instance, so why do we act so shocked when somebody slips in a bad word in the digital equivalent? I mean, I think it was obvious, in retrospect, that Chrysler didn’t sanction the tweet. Somebody just made a mistake.

And, that happens sometimes.

If you’re paying attention to recent trends in our industry, Twitter seems to be the end all, be all of our profession. In actuality, it’s still just a shiny new toy; a toy that will, ultimately, be replaced by something shinier.

According to a recent blog post, there are only about 20 million “real” Twitter users. Or, about 5 percent of Americans. By comparison, that’s about the same number of Americans who own a 3D television, and nobody is quite sure if (or, when) 3D television will ever go mainstream.

So, essentially, we exist in our own little bubble; the importance we put behind Twitter is entirely of our own doing.

Not that it isn’t valuable. It started well enough: “What are you doing?”

Then we turned it into a tool to share valuable content, which led to valuable conversations, which led to us seeking rock star status.

Now the criticism we heap on others dominates our Twitter feeds. Forget about starting conversations. Forget about establishing connections. It is this drive to be the first to point out others’ faults — and gain a small amount of Internet fame — that has become the new American digital past time.

So I ask: When did it become acceptable to play this game? Probably around the same time we started to give the players even a modicum of attention, I answer. Once we started down that path, it would prove damned near impossible to reverse course.

In my humble opinion, Twitter is best used as a vehicle to share information and spur conversations. That’s it. But some see bringing others’ faults into the mainstream as a badge of honor to display proudly, as if we actually give a shit that somebody goofed.

Most of us do not.

Instead of publicly flogging the flaws, let’s focus on using this tool for good. Save the outrage for something that actually matters.