Man O Manti

So many jokes to be made.

For over a week, Manti Te'o has been begging me to talk about him. If you don't already know, Te'o is a football player for Notre Dame. He told a heartwrenching story about his girlfriend, who had leukemia, dying on the same day as his grandmother.

It was great, only it wasn't true. There was no girlfriend, at least not the girl part. Te'o was either elaborately tricked or was in on a fairly simple plan to tell the media a lie.

That's not illegal, nor should it be. Lying is a great part of history when dealing with the media. Presidents like Nixon and Clinton all did it. A great many more have gotten away with it.

It's too easy to say you're disappointed in the media (or the sports media, if you want to be more specific) for not catching on to this ruse. It was fairly simple to unravel and a few reporters came within a few steps of uncovering it all months ago. But they didn't and Deadpsin.com should win a Pulitzer for uncovering the story.

If anything, the Te'o story shines a light on new media. Yes, Deadspin is a website that subsists entirely on advertising and venture capital. Moreover, it's the media establishment like Sports Illustrated and The New York Times that are taking a star turn, only it is the shabby state of fact-checking at our Publications Of Record that is in the limelight.

As revenues have dropped at virtually every major publication across the country, there have been cuts. There are fewer copy editors and fewer fact-checkers. Where there was once a team of editors poring over stories and verifying editors, there are now 50 percent fewer employees writing headlines, running spell check and moving the story down the assembly line.

We've signed up for this. Every time a newspaper asks you to sign up for web content and we find a different way to get that content, we're signing up for it. The Times charges $15 for a four-week digital subscription and they should get the subscribers because, as much as anybody, The Times still has the staff and drive to be the best.

But they don't always get the money because we're mostly not willing to pay for stuff any more. That's just a fact. And as news organizations try to do more with less, they're really doing less with less. Sure, they're streaming it out to iPads and smartphones, but that's work for computers. It takes human power to locate a fact and check it. When you consider the number of facts presented in a typical 600-word story, it's a more daunting task than it sounds.

With stories, we've become content with a crapshoot as far as editors' work reading and editing the stories. Sometimes they have the time to do a great job and sometimes they don't. The onus is on reporters to make sure their work is checked before they send a story to the desk because God knows what's going to happen to it after it's out of their hands.

The irony here is that it's my job to do this work. I don't believe in writing about work, but I have to point out that I'm not talking specifically about my current job at a newspaper. This is not a new problem. It's also not about the people I've worked with; rather, it's about the staffing levels that newspapers can afford.

I got lucky once and caught a story like Te'o's before it was a story. A guy in Salt Lake was trying to get my paper to write a story about him. He was teaching some fitness classes, playing semi-pro football and he made an offhand reference to how he used to play linebacker at Vanderbilt and was an All-SEC player. Twice. I looked him up. No reference to him as an All-SEC player. Vanderbilt puts its media guide online and I checked the section that lists players. He never played for Vanderbilt and we never wrote a story about him. Another newspaper in our area did write a story about the guy. They mentioned his football days. To my knowledge, they never printed a retraction and the story is still available online.

The media would love to say they have learned their lesson and move on from this as quickly as possible. People aren't supposed to be discussing copy editing and fact-checking; it's not the sexy part of what we do.

I'm haunted by the thought that Manti Te'o isn't the first person to throw one mostly past the media and he probably won't be the last. But it's risky business because, ironically, though the Internet has made it difficult for media organizations, it has also leveled the playing field. I've read Deadspin on a daily basis for about five years, but it's a niche' sports website, with stories drawing about 10,000 to 20,000 page views. All it took for them to bring down Te'o was some Google searches and some database searches. There was no Deep Throat. All they needed was a computer and an Internet connection. Anybody could have figured this story out. Deadspin did. They should win a Pulitzer. It's a brave new world.