At one point yesterday Jamie Varner's fighting career was permanently over and he was to be stripped of his WEC lightweight title in disgrace. A few hours later Varner's career was not over and he was still the WEC lightweight champion. How did such a wild oscillation begin, why online of course.

While some grey-beards in journalism would view this as a failure of blogs, and the aggregation of content, that analysis is wholly untrue. After all the initial story began with a traditional newspaper's website, Vindy.com.

Vindy.com is the website of The Vindicator the local newspaper of Trumbull, Mahoning, Mercer and Columbiana counties in Northeast Ohio. The Vindicator is also known as The Youngstown Vindicator as it is the daily newspaper for the city of Youngstown.

The first report from Vindy.com made the assertion that Jamie Varner was to be stripped of the WEC lightweight title. This report spread like wildfire as MMA blogs and news websites cited it as a legitimate source and why shouldn't they, newspapers and their websites are suppose to disseminate accurate information so blaming the readers for taking the information at face value is a disingenuous argument. Also the Vindy article contained numerous quotes from the WEC General Manager several of which seemed to imply that Varner's fighting career was permanently over.

Within a few short hours many, if not all, MMA websites, blogs and forums were citing Vindy.com's report. Again the grey-beards of journalism would cite this  as a deficiency of blogs and other Internet information providers, as they failed to corroborate the information. However, major news outlets follow the same pattern. For instance Chris Mortensen reported that Russ Grimm was to be named the new Steelers coach and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette website ran with it until the Steelers denied the story. As we all know, Mike Tomlin, not Grimn, was named the Steelers head coach. Or take for example the New York Times recent report that Sammy Sosa tested positive for steroids. Papers and news organizations around the country ran with the story, without corroborating it in house. The same pattern occurred in this instance.

The triumph of the online MMA community was how fast the initial reports were clarified once the WEC's General Manger and Jamie Varner spoke out. Instantly updates went up across the world wide web as MMA and WEC fans quickly realized that Varner's career was not over and he would remain the champion. In this facet the speed and efficiency of the online delivery of information cannot be doubted nor question and should be viewed as a success.