There is no net. I tell Mashable reporters this all the time because the membrane between their reporting and the audience could be wafer-thin. What they report and write could be exactly what the audience reads. Not often, but sometimes, and if they misspell a word, misidentify a person or product or get any fact wrong, it's up to them to catch it before it's too late.  That's one lesson of the incredible Manti Te'o story.  Te'o is the college footballer, Heisman runner-up and possibly soon-to-be pro player whose remarkable story of tragedy and triumph captivated the sports world. His grandmother and girlfriend reportedly died within a 24-hour span and Te'o went on to lead his Notre Dame team to victory. As Deadspin expertly reported (you simply must read this story), Te'o's girlfriend's death was a hoax. In fact, she never even existed.  This brings us to the second lesson of this tale:  We are all, potentially, catfish.  Catfish is the 2010 documentary and now MTV series that looks at how average people's lives are turned upside-down when they fall for fake identifies online.  Te'o claims to be one of those people. He told Deadspin he was duped and found the experience "humiliating." Deadspin's reporting indicates, however, that Te'o may know the perpetrator of the hoax online accounts for the non-existent dead girl.  So we have two opposing forces here: The growing issue of online fakery and the media's inability to police the veracity of its own content. The tension is obvious. You have a world that lives its life online. We're images, avatars, handles, quips, memes, gifs, Instagrams and texts, but we're rarely two people standing face-to-face or even ear-to-phone-to-phone-to-ear.  How many people do you "know" whom you've never met in person?  How many people do you "know" whom you've never met in person?  I assume these people are all real, because they have nothing to gain from me by being otherwise. Still the allure is obvious. Create a good profile, tell a good story, hook some gullible people or even co-conspirators, and then play it out until the end.  The end, as Catfish and the Te'o incident show, isn't always good.  In our day-to-day online activities, verifying that people are whom they say they are may not seem all that important. Unless, of course, it's your 14-year-old daughter talking to another 14-year-old girl she met online. Did you know 30% of teenage girls admit meeting in person someone they met online?  Does your stomach feel, like mine, a little sick now?  In reporting, the assumption is that you want the facts. It's the foundation of journalism. You want multiple sources for your story.  Of course, today's journalism is not the journalism of the 20th century.  Speed is valued above almost everything else.  Speed is valued above almost everything else.  Even before the race to be first, the changing economics of digital journalism appeared to be preparing us for the coming fact holocaust.  When I was first in the magazine business in the late '80s and early '90s, we employed a team of fact-checkers — the last stop for every story before polish and publish. Fact checkers called sources and walked through quotes and pulled every nugget of information: dates, times, places, ages, locations, names, relationships, schools, and so on, to double check for accuracy. As a result, it was far more likely that a story would contain a typo than a factual error.  As the Internet rose, traditional media felt the ground shift under its feet and then gradually slip away. Circulations faltered and then plummeted. Ad revenues shrunk and soon most publications, including those I worked for, looked for cuts. Research and fact-checking were the first to go.  The loss of fact-checking hurt less than we thought, and most people still had enough time to work on stories and get the facts right (at PCMag, we published hundreds of pages every two weeks).  Fast forward to today, though, and you see most, if not all reporting happening online first. Some of it still takes months and, like the Deadspin story, is extremely well-reported; other pieces, which are reported and written sometimes in minutes, probably less so.  I can't see into the reporting process behind Sports Illustrated's and ESPN's initial Te'o stories. According to Slate, ESPN's Gene Wojciechowski, who also reported the Te'o story, never found a record of the "girlfriend" Lennay Kekua's obituary or car accident. Why didn't he verify any of it with Kekua's "family?" Te'o apparently told them they did not want to be contacted.  Perhaps Wojciechowski was, like others, swept up by the heartbreaking and yet uplifting story of a football player who conquered, even after the death of his grandmother and girlfriend. I would bet, though, that most of the stories on the subject did not go through an old-school fact check. To do so might have put one or more reporters' stories second or last.  We cannot go back to the old days of huge, expensive fact-checking departments, but clearly something needs to change. How can we trust a source when the very idea of identity is illusory?  It's not impossible for time-constrained reporters to get the story right  It's not impossible for time-constrained reporters to get the story right, but doing so is a team effort. Linking to sources, primary, secondary (even tertiary) is one way of validating your information for the reader, but also an excellent bulwark against reporters picking up baseless or second-hand information without attribution. I often counsel reporters to follow the thread of links from various stories all the way back to the original source. Re-reported content is, by its very nature, interpreted content. If it's true, the facts are somewhere at the end of this trail.  In the case of Te'o, reports might have found that many of the links led nowhere, but to digital dead-ends. And while we're all checking links, we have to stop trusting social media accounts as reliable sources.  It's incredibly easy to create fake accounts on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Google+, as Catfish and Te'o show, and most of us already know. All these services have tried to combat this by requiring the use of "real names," verification and even shutting down accounts that are blatant impersonations. I commend those efforts, but they're largely ineffective.  Being someone other than yourself, a better, more perfect self or even someone completely different is obviously alluring to some people. The thrill of interaction with a person who likes that fake persona must, at least initially, feel like a validation.  Most of Catfish's stories, though, deal with one-on-one relationships. The Te'o case is different because someone, possibly Te'o or the person who created the fake girlfriend account, fooled a nation.  The Internet did not create "the hoax." Piltdown Man, alien autopsy, real fairies in England, all happened well before the age of the Internet and social media. But those two factors have acted like digital lubricant, making it that much easier for even the most average of people to perpetrate the most remarkable hoax. And now our own true protector, the news media, seems particularly unarmed.  Late last year, I predicted the end of anonymous trolls and the rise of reporting. At this moment I hope, maybe more than ever, that I am right, but I'm honestly not so sure.  What I am certain of is that there is no net — for reporters, editors and, most importantly, you.  Photo via Mike Stobe/Getty Images
The Manti Te'o story reminds us that, in the 21st Century, facts and identity are very slippery things. Is the search for truth doomed?