As kids, we played the Telephone Game -- where one person would whisper something to another person, who would whisper it to the next, and so on, until the message delivered to the last person became weird and incomprehensible.

In newspapers, we play a different kind of telephone game: We hear something weird and incomprehensible, then work the phones to find out if it's true.

It's like panning for gold. Sometimes the nuggets lead to a true story, which we put in the paper. More often, though, what we hear isn't true, but we only learn that after some reporting.

Here is a prime example, a true story of an untrue rumor.

Thursday night, one of the Tribune 's editors was attending the Twilight Concert at the Gallivan Center. Amid the crowd noise and music, this editor overheard some Salt Lake City officials talking about a private jet that had landed at the airport and unloaded some cargo.

The editor also heard something about Michael Jackson's corpse possibly being flown here to be mummified by Summum, the religion founded in 1975 that bills itself as the only organization in the world to offer modern mummification.

Under any normal circumstances, this editor would have shrugged off this bit of gossip as ridiculous. But we are talking about Michael Jackson, for whom the ridiculous -- think of the stories of the hyperbaric chamber, the Elephant Man's bones, and Bubbles the chimp -- was often plausible.

So this editor followed his journalistic instincts and passed along the story to his Tribune colleagues Friday -- and our reporters made some calls.

Our reporters went into this with skepticism, beyond the obvious "you gotta be kidding me" reaction the story evokes. There were already rumors on the Internet, quickly proven false, that Jackson's body was to be "plasticized," preserved in plastic resin (like the cadavers in the "Body Worlds" exhibit the Leonardo housed last year). And the same Friday, the New York Post reported Jackson's body was being held temporarily in the family crypt of Motown founder Berry Gordy at the Forest Lawn cemetery, while the Jackson family decides what to do with it.

A Tribune police reporter called an airport spokesperson, who would only confirm that a private plane had landed. Our pop-music writer tried to get hold of a Jackson family spokesperson. And our religion writer, Peggy Fletcher Stack, visited the folks at Summum, about whom she has written extensively in the past.

It was Stack's visit to Summum that provided the first confirmation that the Jackson story was bogus. For starters, she walked in through the front gate -- and didn't see the security guards one might expect if a deceased VIP was inside.

Then the leader of Summum brought up Jackson's name, denying the rumor, before Stack even brought it up.

So how did the Jackson/Summum story start? Stack talked to City Councilman Luke Garrott, one of the officials in that Gallivan conversation, who said he and his colleagues had heard about the private jet -- and were speculating about the cargo in the "wouldn't it be weird if" vein.

You might hear this story and conclude that three reporters wasted a better part of their Friday on a wild goose chase. But a major part of journalism -- an increasingly endangered part -- is weeding out the nonsense.

Imagine if a reckless blogger had heard the Jackson/Summum story. What are the odds that such a blogger, eager to boost his web traffic, would rush to post the story -- whether it was true or not? (Even I was tempted to throw up a post about it on the Culture Vulture blog, and my blog is attached to a supposedly reputable news outlet.)

If a blogger had run the story, a Tribune editor would have assigned reporters to do a follow-up story. My colleagues then would have had to make the same calls they made on Friday. And even after they thoroughly debunked the story, some readers still would have thought it was true -- because they read it on a blog.

So the Tribune didn't get a scoop Friday. But we got the next best thing: A tall tale to tell our journalist friends around the bar.

Sean P. Means writes the Culture Vulture in daily blog form at blogs.sltrib.com/vulture