Last week a blogger who had been a former reporter at a Fort Wayne newspaper got annoyed at a regular columnist in the newspaper and idly googled his column.

What followed was international media exposure, embarrassment and scrambling for the newspaper and the resignation of the columnist - Tim Goeglein, White House Deputy Director of the Office of Public Liaison.

I saw the story over at Bible Belt Blogger and didn’t bother reading it. Being ever the cynic I thought, ‘oh, another one’, and moved on.  I saw a blog post or two where people were arguing which of the commandments was broken (depends on your stream of faith, Catholic, Protestant, Jewish) and finally had the time to head over to the blog of Nancy Nall, the reporter (now in Michigan) who found the plagiarism.
What a gem!

This is what the very best of bloggers who know the locality can be.
She is a succinct writer, and the people who inhabit her comment section are a community; they picked this up and ran with it, swatting away disgruntled others with the ease most of us would swat mosquitoes.

To see how this story unfolded in real time is amazing.
In the course of approximately 8 hours, her readers picked up 7 plagiarized columns from obscure and not so obscure places, had a great deal of fun doing so, revelled in the attention without being obnoxious, tracked how the News-Sentinel handled the issue, got about 200 mentions in traditional media…reading the post and comment thread is like hanging around the edges of a picnic where everyone belongs and is having a grand time.

This post should win an award, it really should, for all the best blogging can be.  Many of the comments are hilarious. There is no heavy duty pondering or scolding, they tackle their task with delight as they watch events unfold.

It took the Fort Wayne newspaper she had worked for approximately 8 hours to acknowledge her (through AP). 10 hours in 19 plagiarized columns had been found. Between 5:30 pm and 6:00 they find a typo in the Indiana newspaper account and more merriment occurs. By 6:47 pm Goeglein resigned his position at the White House.
As comments go into March 1, political types show up.
By then hundreds of news outlets had picked up the story, got some of it wrong, some of it right. I read today that 27 of Timothy Goeglein’s columns had been plagerized in the Fort Wayne paper alone. They are still counting.

Nancy Nall sums up in Notes from the Crater