Twitter a reliable source on news of Paterno's death

Unfortunately much of the news of Penn State Coach Joe Paterno’s death this morning surrounds early false reports of his death.

The Seattle Times reports ‘Joe Paterno death rumors flood Twitter.’ Jim Romenesko has a nice story about the support the Penn State newspaper editor is receiving after his resignation for making an erroneous report of Paeterno’s death.

Being on Twitter yesterday evening I can tell you Twitter was a reliable source of information on news of Paterno’s grave condition and possible impending death. This, even the face of CBS news erroneously reporting of Paterno’s death.

I saw the ESPN report of Paterno’s grave condition while watching the Notre Dame basketball game. As I am apt to do, I started to follow ‘Paterno’ on Twitter on my iPad. My daughter, Ainsley, also a big sports fan, came downstairs a short time later and let my son and I know Joe had died.

I saw the report on CBS news, but 99% of the Tweets I was seeing said Paterno was in serious condition. The tweets made no mention of his death nor did they refute reports of his death. The tweets just reported Paterno was in serious condition, that family and friends were gathering at the hospital, and that Penn State students were gathering at certain locations for candle light vigils.

My conclusion, based on Twitter, was that Paterno was indeed gravely ill, but that he had not died. I believe any rational person familiar with Twitter would have reached the same conclusion.

Remember that Twitter is a raw news feed. Legendary news reporter, Walter Cronkite, had news feeds, news bureaus, and phone reports from which to digest the news before getting on TV and reporting the news to us.

We didn’t get the raw feeds Walter did back in the day. Today we do.

It’s up to us to make sense of the raw feeds and interpret the news.

Don’t fault Twitter as an unreliable source of news. Fault the people who drew the wrong conclusions from the raw news feeds.