Leading off today: Investing legend Warren Buffett has built a chunk of his vast financial empire by following a disciplined set of rules, one of which is to stick with what he knows -- railroads and manufacturing, for instance.
While there's been money to be made in high tech, Buffett doesn't dabble there very often because he purports to not understand it.
Oh, if only Yuri Wright had subscribed to the "don't mess with it if you don't understand it" philosophy. His failure to do so has forced one of the nation's top high school football prospects to trade down from the likes of the up-and-coming Michigan Wolverines to the Colorado Buffaloes.
Wright, a defensive back from New Jersey regarded as a four-star recruit by several services, had narrowed his finalists to Michigan, Notre Dame, Rutgers, and Colorado before the recruiting process blew up due to self-inflicted mistakes that led to him being expelled from Don Bosco Prep last week.
Wright had recently played in the U.S. Army All-American Bowl in San Antonio when it came to light that stuff he was posting on his Twitter account would make Richard Pryor blush. That left his coach -- New Jersey legend Greg Toal -- and school administrators with little choice but to give Wright the boot.
Toal told ESPN that players were warned repeatedly to stay away from social media sites if they were going to talk trash -- or talk trashy.
"We told them about 10 or 15 times to get off (Twitter) and not to be involved in it, but there is always somebody who thinks he knows better." he said. "What he wrote was pretty bad to be honest with you, I can't even say what he wrote."
Wright has since deleted the account, which had more than 1,600 followers. With interest from several suitors having dried up, he committed to Colorado early this week.
The Wright story was just beginning to gain traction across the country over the weekend when a much bigger blunder overtook that episode. Numerous websites -- including CBS Sports and Huffington Post -- incorrectly reported early Saturday evening that Penn State coach Joe Paterno had died. CBS went so far as to send out e-mail alerts to subscribers of its service.
What the CBS email failed to do, however, was attribute the report to its source: OnwardState.com, a student newspaper at Penn State. OnwardState.com's Twitter account reported that Nittany Lions players received emails informing them that Paterno had died.
CBS officials ended up having to admit they did not try to verify that report before posting their version to the website.
The race to be first -- a morbid competition, to be sure -- blew up in the face of one of the best-known news organizations on the planet. Within hours, criticism was mounting from all directions and others on Twitter started posting spoofs with a #CBSSportsSays hash tag. Among them:
• #CBSSportsSays Rob Lowe is a good reporter.
• #CBSSportsSays OJ Simpson is innocent.
• #CBSSportsSays it's ok to talk about #FightClub.
• #CBSSportsSays Bill Buckner picked up the ball and stepped on first base.
• #CBSSportsSays taco bell is a mexican phone company.
Ouch.
It's interesting that a lot of early reaction by the public once the story came out about how the college paper started the sequence of mistakes was anti-Twitter and suspicious of the news-travels-fast era in which we live.
All I can say to that is that blaming Twitter or other social media is blaming the messenger in the literal and
