Sandusky Who?

Last week, dozens of Facebook status' clogged up my newsfeed spouting opinions on the Penn State scandal. "JoePa" was flowing off the tongues of people who had never watched a college football game before in their life.

As the indictment news of multiple Penn State employees was revealed, media outlets went wild and the stories poured out- Joe Paterno involved in sex scandal. Joe Paterno to retire at the end of the season. Joe Paterno fired.

Wait, legendary coach Paterno sexually abused multiple boys in the showers at Penn State? Not the case, but if you would have been watching ESPN or any other station covering the scandal last week, it would be easy to think just that.

In the seemingly nonstop coverage of the scandal, Paterno was at the helm. The actual villian here, Jerry Sandusky, was given an almost-free pass from the media.

Sandusky, former coach for the Nittany Lions, was the one who abused those eight boys over multiple years. Mike McQueary, assistant coach, was the one who witnessed Sandusky molesting a young boy in the Penn State showers. Paterno is the one who is getting all the blame.

Now, understand this, I am in absolutely NO way trivializing what happened here or saying that Paterno was in the right by not making sure that Sandusky was punished for his inexcusable actions. In my opinion, all three of these men should be fired and held accountable for their actions, but I don't believe that the media coverage is providing fair coverage.

I would be willing to bet that a significant amount of people thought that Paterno was the alleged assaulter.

If Paterno was not the legendary coach that he is, and was let's say someone like Iowa State's Gene Chizik, would we be getting this same sort of coverage? Would we be hearing more about the president of the college also being fired along with the coach? I'd like to think so.

We, and the media, need to remember that this is bigger than football and bigger than Paterno, no matter how prolific he may be.

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Which Comes First — Newspaper or Blog?

At Penn State, a group of students have beaten the school paper at informing the student body on their blog, Onward State. This blog, which was created just a mere 14 months before, is run by only 20 students compared to the school paper which is ran by 200 students. It does seem impressive that this group of students is able to report stories much faster than that of an average paper. They reported a story 4 days before the paper was able to. Chase Tralka has even admitted that the paper has stolen items from the blog to use for publication. This is easily setting an example for the possibility of the future of journalism.

People are wanting the news as soon as it happens and blogging seems to the way to make that possible. At NYU they also have a blog set up and this seems to be similar to Onward State. It is called NYU Local, and deals with issues involve the students. Another idea is that the closer the news, the more important it will be to those that it will affect.

The true question that this brings up is how this will affect the future of newspapers. Many have begun using online sources to access the articles that are online. This not only is convenient but helps reduce the amount of paper that needs to be produce. While almost all newspapers have gone to the web, there is still the transition from news articles to blog entries that could possibly replace the idea of journalism completely. The only negative thing that was said was the fact the blogger can post anything, which would mean that the traditional idea of named sources, unbiased opinions, and printing information that is inaccurate or false would not be necessary for the blogger to post. This would make the article riskier to believe, and ultimately make it harder to trust the media.

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