On Thursday, Penn State plans to hold a service entitled “A Memorial For Joe” inside the 16,000-seat Bryce Jordan Center. It’ll be streamed online and broadcast on cable, but of course some Penn State fans really want to attend. So much so, that tickets to the event “sold out” in just seven minutes after becoming available, according to the AP.

The tickets were actually free, but on a first come, first serve basis. Over 10,000 tickets were up for grabs, and according to Penn State’s athletic site, ticket orders were limited to two per person. Apparently, not everyone that snatched up tickets actually wanted to attend the event – some had different motives.

Looking to bank on the legendary sports figure’s popularity (and possibly his recent controversy) some ticket-holders put theirs up on eBay. And before eBay pulled the listings, one of them had reached nearly $100K from about 73 bids.

There’s some chatter that Penn State faithfuls drove up the price in order to prevent the scalper the satisfaction of making a buck off Joe Paterno’s death, but whatever the case, eBay did eventually pull the listings as they violate this particular policy:

Some news outlets struggled with accurately reporting Joe Paterno’s death last weekend. It appears some people, in this case, struggled with acceptable social behavior. But enough about Joe Paterno.

The Poynter Institute, whose mission it is to make sure “communities have access to excellent journalism,” has posted an interesting series of articles pointing out journalism’s failures with regards to former Penn State football head coach Joe Paterno.

Paterno is reportedly in serious condition in a hospital in State College, PA, but is still alive. However, Penn State student news site Onward State reported that Paterno died last night. Once that initial report came out, various other news organizations jumped on the story and started falsely reporting his death too.

While it’s been deleted now, CBS News tweeted that he had died, apparently based on the Onward State report, but without attribution. Poynter shows the embed.

In another of the Poynter articles, Craig Silverman points out how “journalists’ hunger for glory” can get them in trouble. “The tension between speed and accuracy is always highlighted in these cases,” he writes.

“Journalists need to do a better job calculating the risk of being first, rather than focusing on the benefit,” Silverman writes. “How many people would have recalled — or cared — that Onward State broke the news? Aside from some journalists, I’d wager very few people. This kind of breaking news report spreads quickly, and whatever credit that may have gone to Onward State in the early minutes would have disappeared once the information was confirmed and widespread.”

The speed vs. accuracy issue has become more of a challenge for reporters thanks to the realtime nature of today’s web. This seems to be brought to light when false death reports emerge, then are proven wrong. Remember when this happened with Jon Bon Jovi recently?

It does make you wonder how many other falsities are being taken as truths, with stories that don’t demand as much attention as the death of a celebrity.

Onward State’s managing editor has resigned. He posted the following apology:

Earlier this evening, Onward State reported that Joe Paterno had passed away; however, the mountain of evidence stacked opposite that report became too much to ignore. At this time, I would like to issue an official retraction of our earlier tweets.

Devon Edwards

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past couple of weeks, you know that Penn State has been embroiled in a huge scandal involving allegations of child abuse and rape – and Sandusky is the focal point of those allegations. Eye witnesses claim to have seen Sandusky engaging in sexual intercourse with underage boys, a charge that Sandusky currently denies.

Evidence so far points to a cover-up within the Penn State program, and the fallout has hit legendary head coach Joe Paterno, as he was fired late last week.

Last night, Sandusky appeared on the program for an exclusive interview with Costas, and the results were pretty shocking. The interview began with Costas pushing Sandusky to declare his absolute innocence –

BOB COSTAS:
Innocent? Completely innocent and falsely accused in every aspect?

JERRY SANDUSKY:
Well I could say that, you know, I have done some of those things. I have horsed around with kids. I have showered after workouts. I have hugged them and I have touched their leg. Without intent of sexual contact. But – so if you look at it that way – there are things that wouldn’t – you know, would be accurate.

Sandusky continued to deny the charges and refute eyewitness accounts that point to his guilt. Eventually, Costas articulates what most people were thinking at the moment:

BOB COSTAS:
How could somebody think they saw something as extreme and shocking as that when it hadn’t occurred, and what would possibly be their motivation to fabricate it?

JERRY SANDUSKY:
You’d have to ask them.

BOB COSTAS:
It seems that if all of these accusations are false, you are the unluckiest and most persecuted man that any of us has ever heard about.

JERRY SANDUSKY:
I don’t know what you want me to say. I don’t think that these have been the best days of my life.

And the transcript really doesn’t do the interview justice. Costas was masterful. He tackled a delicate issue with class, but he didn’t back away from the explicit details of the allegations. He pushed Sandusky to volunteer more information at the right times, and he presented logical followups to some of the unbelievable things coming out of Sandusky’s mouth.

I can’t declare a man guilty from a interview. Sandusky will get his day in court. He is innocent until proven guilty. But man did that interview fail to help his cause. The written transcript doesn’t show how bad it was for Sandusky. He sounded awkward, hesitant, and made critical pauses before answering questions. You can check out the full interview below:

It’s truly tough to watch.

Twitter provides some good commentary, as people everywhere were shocked at what they were hearing:

Many from the sports and broadcasting fields praised Costas for his work during the interview:

Costas appeared on the “Morning Joe” program on MSNBC this morning to discuss the interview. He said that it was a last minute thing, that he was supposed to be interviewing Sandusky’s lawyer only. Right before the cameras started rolling, Sandusky’s lawyer asked Costas if he wanted to talk to the man himself.

Costas said that he was thinking that wasn’t a great idea. ‘I wonder from your standpoint whether that’s the smartest thing to do, but at the same time, sure,’” Costas said. “…We pivoted and made it an interview with Sandusky.”

As far as the court of public opinion goes, Sandusky did little to help his cause. What do you think? Let us know in the comments.

Naturally, the disapproval manifested itself through marches and protests, as the student body moved, en masse, throughout the Penn State campus, vocalizing their support for the now-fired coach. Naturally, there’s video of the demonstrations and they a great job of capturing the frustration — warranted or not — of the Nittany Lions student body.

Disclaimer, in no way is any of this content being done to make light of the victims in this horrible situation. The lead image is a good indicator of how we feel about it. We are just focusing on all the web content that appeared after Paterno’s firing was announced. As indicated, the students marched/rioted/expressed their dissatisfaction, and a lot of it was captured and uploaded to YouTube, included the Penn State student body overturning a news van:

Once “aplusk” tweeted that, it, has they say, was on:

As for Kutcher, apparently, he’s playing the “my account was hacked/it wasn’t me” card, although, perhaps I’m taking the following excuse explanation the wrong way:

Something I’m sure will be disheartening news to his 8 million-plus sycophantic followers fans.

There’s an unfortunate side effect of Kutcher’s brilliance, and that’s taking the focus away from where it belongs, respecting and advocating the victims. Good thing Jay Glazer was there to remind us:

That solemn tweet should serve as a reminder of why Joe Paterno is no longer the coach of the Penn State football team.

C. Lee Giles, the David Reese Professor of Information Sciences and Technology who led the research team which developed a new search engine—BotSeer—for the study, found the result "surprising".

Giles said, "We expected that robots.txt files would treat all search engines equally or maybe disfavor certain obnoxious bots, so we were surprised to discover a strong correlation between the robots favored and the search engines’ market share".

Some of the results are:

More than any other search engine, Google’s is most favored and called most often.

Take a look at the chart below and guess who the prodigal one is.

Apparently, the study’s title is, "Determining Bias to Search Engines from Robots.txt (PDF)," Barry Schwartz has a local copy for easy download.

Comments

The study was conducted by researchers at Penn State’s College of Information Sciences and Technology. The researchers copied results from four different search engines: Google, MSN Live Search, Yahoo! and one they developed specifically for the study.

They took those results, combined them to make identical results for four queries: "camping Mexico," "laser removal," "manufactured home," and "techno music." Despite that the results were identical, the study participants picked Yahoo! as the most relevant, with Google and MSN (in third again, it would seem) trailing behind.

The in-house non-branded engine the researchers created did the worst, rated 10 percent below average.

"Given that there was no difference in the results, all of the search engines should have had the exact same score," said Jim Jansen, assistant professor and lead researcher. "Some emotional branding is having an effect here."

The results mirror a study conducted in 2004 that compared participants cola preferences. In that study, brain scans revealed that when participants knew which cola (Coke or Pepsi) they were drinking, the regions of the brain associated with memory and cultural influences were activated, and affected their preferences.

"[T]here are visual images and marketing messages that have insinuated themselves into the nervous systems of humans that consume the drinks," the researchers concluded.

They also found that, when brands were known, Coke was cola of choice, trouncing Pepsi, whose brand had no influence.