News Media Reeling After Bloggers Bust Manti Te’o Hoax

There is nothing that irritates me more as a writer and as a journalist than when so-called “professional” journalists first spot a story on smaller blogs, make a few phone calls, conduct a few interviews and then rewrite the story and publish it on major news websites without a single credit to the original source – the blogger that first covered that story.

The wonderful thing about the Manti Te’o girlfriend hoax is that, try as they might, they can’t steal credit for the story – because the bloggers themselves are part of the story.

It all started when Deadspin.com bloggers Timothy Burke and Jack Dickey published their full, highly detailed and professionally researched article describing all of the evidence that blew Manti Te’o's long-running story about his alleged girlfriend out of the water.

As the story picked up steam on the newswire, it became apparent that many in the media were stunned by the news, and even more shocking was the fact that so many sports news outlets had egg on their faces for carrying the stories about the fake girlfriend without doing so much as an ounce Read more…