Newspaper reporters and editors have long wrestled with how difficult it is to consistently come up with good news stories. There are all those pages to fill, day after day, and there are only so many interesting things going on in the world.

And the Internet news hole is even bigger.

Politicians pretty much provide the bulk of what we report. Religion, sports, wars, scandals and disasters help us fill in the gaps, and we're glad to have them. Every once in a while, something good happens and we pass that along -- if we're desperate.

But it isn't easy.

So who can really blame student journalist Michael Brenner, editor of The Daily Egyptian at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, Ill., for grabbing onto what seemed to be a really good story when it dropped into his lap?

How was he to know that it wasn't true at all?

(For the purpose of relating this narrative to you as clearly as possible, I'm going to put some of the untrue portions in quotation marks.)

The story, according to The Associated Press, was a heart-rending saga of a precocious little girl, "8-year-old Kodee Kennings," whose mother was dead and whose father had been sent to serve in Iraq. The Daily Egyptian, a publication with a circulation of 22,000, independent of the university, first told the tale in May 2003 and followed up on it with numerous reports over the course of the next couple years.

There were photographs of little "Kodee," an innocent blonde waif with a big smile who talked about missing her daddy, "Sgt. Dan Kennings," while he fought with the 101st Airborne in Iraq. They even had "Kennings" himself, who appeared in the student newsroom during a "leave" from the military, shaking hands with the staff and thanking them for taking care of his daughter while he was in Iraq.

"Kodee" didn't just wander off the streets and into the newsroom. She was accompanied by her "guardian," a woman named "Colleen Hastings," who started the whole thing rolling when she struck up a conversation with Brenner in a bar.

"Hastings" was, in fact, Jaimie Reynolds, a 2004 SIU graduate, who admits her role in the massive deception but claims that Brenner was the one who concocted the scheme.

	Family photo via the Chicago Tribune
	This undated family photo shows Caitlin Hadley, 10, with Patrick D. Trovillion, 24, a registered nurse in Marion, Ill. The two were convinced they were playing a part in a movie about a girl coping with her father and only relative being deployed to Iraq, but they were enmeshed in an elaborate hoax, the Daily Egyptian, Southern Illinois University's student newspaper acknowledged today.

According to The Daily Egyptian, Reynolds said she went along because Brenner paid attention to her, saying he "said all the things I wanted to hear. It wasn't a crush. But he looked at me, and looked twice. He became a friend and didn't care I was fat."

Seriously, you can't make this stuff up. Oh, wait. Yes, it was.

The Daily Egyptian reports claim that Reynolds recruited an out-of-state friend of her family, Caitlin Hadley, 10, to play the part of "Kodee." Caitlin was driven to Carbondale by Reynolds and told to pretend that she was "Kodee" as part of a movie that was being filmed.

"It was sort of weird, but I had a lot of fun," Caitlin told The Chicago Tribune, which conducted its own investigation of the hoax. Caitlin said Reynolds told her that everybody she met in Carbondale was in the movie.

"We were always on camera, but I didn't see any cameras," Caitlin said.

What the little girl did see was a newsroom full of eager young reporters yearning to cover a good story. Not only did they report on what "Kodee" was going through, they published letters and subsequently interviewed her over the telephone for additional stories. They even had her write her own column on occasion.

The column, according to The Daily Egyptian, was "at times funny and at times heart-rending."

And at all times pure malarkey.

When the story got a little slow, in walked "Sgt. Dan Kennings," a man named Patrick Trovillion, an acquaintance of Reynolds who said he also thought he was in a movie, playing the part of a cocky soldier. He said he was paid about $100.

The whole thing began to unravel two weeks ago when the staff at The Daily Egyptian was informed that "Kennings" had been killed in battle. They even were invited to a memorial service.

At this point, The Daily Egyptian and other Illinois news outlets started doing some of the investigating that should have been going on all along. As reporters contacted military officials for information on "Kennings," they kept running into the same irksome fact.

There was no record of any "Kennings." There never had been.

"In the course of checking out the details, a troubling problem appeared: The story wasn't true," The Daily Egyptian wrote today in an editorial. "What began as a nightmarish possibility became impossible to deny."

And now the finger-pointing begins.

Reynolds blames Brenner, who wrote the original article and went on to become the paper's editor and collected a couple of awards.

"He's had a hard time with his career," she said. "He asked me if I would help him out. ... It just got a little bigger than he told me it would."

Brenner maintains his innocence, saying, "Many of the people I have been talking to the last couple of years have completely betrayed me. I guess there was no relationship there in the first place, since they didn't love me. I can't believe Kodee isn't even real."

Trovillion, who played the part of "Kennings" -- whether it was for a movie or not -- said, "This really chaps me a little bit. That ain't no way to treat our armed forces."

Rich Hadley, who is Caitlin's father -- in real life -- said his daughter is having trouble coping with what happened.

"She's very sad," he told The Daily Egyptian. "She will just burst into tears out of the blue. At one point she turned to me and asked, 'Did Jamie like me?' "

The Jackson County prosecutor hasn't said anything yet, but he would be the one to decide whether or not to file criminal charges in the hoax.

And then there is Walter Jaehnig, an SIU ethics professor and director of the university's journalism school. He told The Associated Press that the hoax, while embarrassing, does serve to teach journalism students "the importance of fact checking and verification of everything they write."

Which is always a good idea. Of course, I'm not certain that he really said that. It's not like I bothered to speak with him myself.