Devon Edwards’ Mistake

January 24, 2012 by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: social media 
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It was the ultimate oops, going down in real time.

Onward State, a student-run blog about Penn State University, had reported via Twitter on the evening of Saturday, Jan. 21, 2012 that legendary (and recently fired) Penn State football coach Joe Paterno had died. CBS sports and other news outlets soon picked up the story.

Only problem was, JoePa wasn’t dead. Not yet, anyway.

Paterno, age 85 and in the hospital for complications from his lung cancer treatment, had been taken off a respirator—this much was true. He passed away the next morning, but not before the footballs hit the fan. The Paterno family issued a blunt rebuttal of the report, saying that the family patriarch was fighting on. CBS sports retracted its report. Angry Penn State fans made, well, angry tweets. And the managing editor of Onward State, Penn State student Devon Edwards, resigned immediately from his post, saying in a message on the blog:

I never, in a million years, would have thought that Onward State might be cited by the national media…In this day and age, getting it first often conflicts with getting it right, but our intention was never to fall into that chasm. All I can do now is promise that in the future, we will exercise caution, restraint, and humility.

It’s easy to be critical of Devon Edwards, but the fact remains he’s just a kid. He made a mistake, but he handled it in a very adult manner by issuing a sincere apology and resigning. He doesn’t deserve to lose his job, but given the intense emotion surrounding the release of Paterno, the anger from fans, and the heinous crime that was covered up or at least handled poorly by Penn State’s football staff on Paterno’s watch, it’s probably for the best.

Let’s just hope that Devon Edwards doesn’t become a Steve Bartman, the Chicago Cubs fan who tried to catch a foul ball during a playoff game with the Florida Marlins—a ball that Cubs outfielder Moises Alou was also trying to catch. Cubs fans like to think that Bartman cost them a World Series. Bartman was doing what any fan would do: trying to catch a foul ball. In the heat of the moment, he didn’t make a good decision.

Edwards is guilty of the same. In this insane, information-crazy media world into which we’ve found ourselves thrust unprepared, a world in which everything is “so 12 seconds ago,” Edwards made a mistake in the heat of the moment. In the rush to be first, to scoop the world, he goofed by not practicing one of the most basic tenants of journalism: check your facts.

Steve Bartman has since become a ghost, not talking to the media and certainly not attending Cubs games. His mistake ruined him in many ways. It would be a shame if this happened to Devon Edwards, too. Get back on the horse, kid. You’ve learned an important lesson about the sorry state of the media. Consider this a challenge to the next generation of journalists to change it.

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SOPA and your business

January 19, 2012 by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: internet 
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The internet is abuzz over SOPA, or the Stop Online Piracy Act, a bill that is currently under consideration in the US House of Representatives (H.R. 3261). (The corresponding Senate bill is PIPA, which is short for the Protect IP Act, which itself is short for Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act of 2011).

Ugh. Sick of the acronyms yet? Only the military could come up with more contrived combinations of letters. And they have: ARGONAUT, or Applied Research reGarding Operationally Novel And Unique Technologies. (And that’s just one example…)

SOPA and PIPA are supposed to protect something of great value to companies and writers, too: intellectual property. These acts would do that by giving the Justice Department new powers to protect your intellectual property, including getting court orders that would bar online advertisers from doing business with websites that trade in illegally obtained copyrighted material, and even putting people in jail for distributing copyrighted material. That means if you write something and copyright it (you don’t even have to file the copyright—just say it’s copyrighted and it is) and post in on your website, and someone steals it and distributes it, the feds could be all over the case. The same goes for a company’s intellectual material.

This has been coming for quite some time, really. Back in the internet’s Wild West phase in the late 1990s, copyrights were largely ignored. Programs like Napster allowed people to share bad copies of songs if they were willing to wait up to an hour for them to download. You see, in those days, nearly everyone was connecting to the internet with a dial-up modem over a phone line. If the government had created an acronym for this technology, it would be SLOW, or TURTLE. Sure, a lot of pirating of copyrighted material took place, and that’s one of the reasons that Napster was shut down. But we hadn’t seen anything yet.

Fast forward to 2012. Broadband internet is everywhere, even in rural China, where US copyright law isn’t in the vocabulary. Thanks to broadband internet, file-sharing programs like BitTorrent, and hundreds of millions of people worldwide who like to share, one can download an entire two-and-a-half-hour movie in HD in literally just a few minutes. Compared to the Clinton era, the sharing of copyrighted material today is like comparing a Ferrari to a Model T Ford.

Critics of the proposed laws say they overreach and give the federal government the power to violate the first amendment and censor the internet. In fact, by the time you read this, WikiPedia and potentially dozens of other sites will have already staged day-long blackouts of their sites in protest.

What does this mean for your business? It means you need to educate yourself and make up your own mind. A good overview can be found on CNET. I won’t tell you how to think or what to decide. But this is big, and you owe it to yourself to learn the facts and then voice your opinion to your Congressmen and Senators.

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