Stephen Glass was the staff writer for The New Republic magazine who was caught making up articles. They made a movie about it called Shattered Glass, starring Hayden Christensen as Glass, which I saw last night. Anyway, my question is: how did Glass’s story get past TNR’s fact checkers in the first place? He refers to a software company and to several people by name.
You must not have been paying close attention to the movie. 
They explained a lot of it in great detail.
In short, for “anonymous sources,” all the fact-checker has to rely on is the reporter’s notes. Glass also set up fake websites and fake voicemail boxes to convince them that his fictional companies existed.
No, I saw that. But he created the website and got his brother involved after the fact, after the article was published and the other magazine was trying to follow up. What did TNR do with his article that referred to “Jukt Micronics” and the hacker and the hacker’s agent and all that? How did it ever get published in the first place?
I haven’t seen the movie, but based on what’s been said above, I think a better question than “How?” would be “Why?” If he was just being lazy . . . it sounds like he did as much work to back up his lies as he would have in digging up the truth.
I think the answer to that is just that he wanted to write interesting and entertaining articles where there weren’t any, so he made stuff up. The movie suggests that he came from a somewhat demanding family background and was a talented, hard-working and ambitious 24-year-old who wanted to prove himself and who may have had a touch of narcissistic personality disorder – that “Ain’t I something? I dare you to catch me” thing.