Well, yesterday was ... interesting? I'm still a little exhausted from the Seantrel Henderson fray, which is probably why I can't come up with a better word for a day that included ignoring some of the very pratfalls I had talked about earlier in the week. (Note: Regular readers will even be startled by the singular personal pronoun instead of the royal "we" used througout this post. There's just no other way if I am to avoid confusion).

The day began with USC emerging as a favorite to land Henderson -- the No. 1 recruit in the nation by some accounts -- both according to outside reports and what we were starting to hear at the Star Tribune. Ohio State and Miami still wouldn't have surprised anyone. Anything else would have, including Minnesota. But it was still a mystery. As the one directing traffic on the prep staff, I wanted as much Seantrel stuff on our web site as possible. That meant stuff his friend said. That meant text messages from his dad. The appetite for updates on the story was insatiable, and any morsel we could throw out to advance or at least contextualize the ongoing saga was worthwhile in my mind.

At around 3:30 p.m., by sheer coincidence, one of our high school staff members came upon what we thought was a good source with some big news: Seantrel had texted a Cretin-Derham Hall teammate to tell him the University of Miami was his choice. At that point, there was an hour left before Henderson's official decision was set to be announced on live TV (CBS College Sports to be exact, and that photo is courtesy of them). In the office, we weighed the source, the news and the impact. Time was of the essence. And here is where a few things broke down -- things that I will not only remember but use when I speak to a conference of college journalists in a couple of weeks.

1) The source was good, but not good enough. There are unwritten minimum standards for sourcing, and in retrospect I'm not comfortable enough that they were met -- even for a couched, "we'll see" kind of report.

2) The language of what we ended up going with in terms of the information was probably too strong. Here's what was written on our Preps Insider blog: According to information we just received, Seantrel Henderson is expected to announce in less than an hour that he will sign with the University of Miami. There have been plenty of rumors flying around today; the source of this tidbit appears to carry some reliability. Henderson's announcement is scheduled for 4:30. Let's see what happens.

The news value at the top doesn't match the source. There is wiggle room there, just as there is in the tweet sent from my RandBall account: Sounds like U of Miami is the likely destination for Seantrel Henderson. We'll know for sure in about 45 minutes.

The original headline on the blog post started with "Hot rumor:" When it moved to the home page, it was changed (with my blessing) to "Source:" I have to think that elevates the expectation level of a reader. Hot rumor was probably a safer description -- even though we believed in the source -- but a rumor is fit more for an "insider's" consumption on the prep blog and not the general reader that might find it on the home page. The "Source:" headline is also the one that made it onto the Star Tribune Twitter feed, as pointed out by Brauer. (As of 9:15 a.m., his rehashing of the 3:30-4:30 hour is still at the top of his blog. C'mon, David! Get cranking! Nothing to see there). None of this is an excuse, of course -- just a look at the decision-making process and how things happen in a matter of minutes.

3) All that said, in a perfect world, the prep staff -- and, in particular, yours truly -- would have tucked that information in our pockets and either waited for better confirmation or simply let the day play out. Yes, it was a frenzied day where information, speculation and other such things were flying fast and furious. But if we are to be standard-setters instead of standard-followers, we can't just get caught up in it all. There was far less to gain by being 45 minutes early than there was to lose by being 100 percent wrong, even if we were trying to hedge our bets. And in this case, we could be sure that a final answer was coming at a finite time. Sometimes judgment isn't just about right or wrong, it's about what's at stake in either case.

So, for about an hour, those following the Star Tribune or RandBall thought there was a very good chance Henderson was going to sign with Miami. It's not quite of the "Dewey defeats Truman" scale, but that doesn't diminish the awful feeling of not being accurate. Metrics tell us plenty of people read the Miami report, even if it was just a small sliver of the huge traffic yesterday. But even if just one person reads it ... well ... it's just never good. In the old days, nobody would have ever known. If nobody knew before the presses ran the night before, then everyone would have had to wait until 4:30. Now, there's a chance to be right or wrong many times in a given day. Yesterday, we (and I) spent an hour being wrong until everyone knew what was right. Next time, we (and I) will be better for it.

Questions:

1) As a reader, do you like knowing the process and hearing information as it develops? That is to say, if a reporter says on Twitter, "Working on a tip about Brett Favre coming back. More later," is that valuable? (Note: There is no such tip, at least not that we know of. Merely an example). Does it just serve to cloud the picture or do you like getting the first whiff and following the story through, regardless of whether it ends up being true or not?

2) Are there different grades of expectation from something written on Twitter to a blog to an on-line news story to something that appears in the paper? I'm not talking about writing style here as much as I am about information and what passes for "news."

3) Would you like to be 6-8, 330ish pounds and be headed to USC for a free education, the adoration of the masses and a possible future making millions of dollars in the NFL?