Always, always, always verify information.

Twitter is very powerful. So powerful that it has the ability to kill people.

Former Penn State football coach Joe Paterno died on Saturday according to Twitter, and on Sunday in reality. AP reports that the source of this misinformation was Penn State's student newspaper. The publication tweeted Paterno died, and then everyone picked up on it: CBS, People.com, The Huffington Post.

But then someone put their thinking cap on and went out to verify this information. I think they only set out to double check because Paterno's sons took to Twitter to announce that no, he was still alive. The first tweet I saw about it was CNN:

"CNN's @susancandiotti just spoke to Paterno spokesman and says Paterno is NOT dead. 'Not true. Not true. Not True.'"

All the news organizations came out and apologized and accurately reported when Paterno died for real on Sunday morning. The common theme for everyone tweeting the misinformation seems to be the pressure to break the story first. So I guess congratulations to them, they broke the story before it even happened!

In all my journalism classes the professor always drills into our heads to verify everything. Even a reliable source like CBS can report false information, only driving the point home even more: everything always needs to be verified.