Any of our writing profs might want to check out this story. ”Gone in 60 Seconds: How my blog started the avalanche that buried presidential aide Tim Goeglein.”It’s about how journalist/blogger Nancy Nall Derringer accidentally uncovered a White House official’s eight year pattern of plagiarism by simply Google fact checking an op-ed piece he had written for a small market newspaper. After posting the discovery to her own blog, other bloggers dug deeper into the story, found more, and within 12 hours the offending official had to resign.
Here’s the link:
http://www.slate.com/id/2185657/nav/tap3/
Possible ways the story might be useful to our students:
* How a little bit of journalistic curiosity can generate huge results
* The danger of cutting and pasting from other people’s work
* How the 21st Century news cycle has gone from days to minutes
* How citizen journalists take stories and run with them
Nathan
