Nice work, Nancy!

Congratulations are in order. A Lone Buffalo colleague of mine, Nancy Nall, was responsible for the big national story last week which brought down White House faith-based liaison Tim Goeglein. You've probably seen/read about the little scandal, which has cost Goeglein his job, even if you haven't heard the backstory.

Now, the Arboretum is always happy to see one of the Bushies felled by the journalistic axe. It helps clear the way for proper trees to grow. But this story is especially delicious, because it's the epitome of citizen-journalism.

Nancy used to be a staffer at the Fort Wayne News-Sentinel, and still reads it online. And over the past couple years, she's had plenty of fun at the expense of Tim Goeglein, an Indiana native who made good as a White House aide and, inexplicably, took to filing "slice of life" guest columns with the News-Sentinel. (Oddly, as she notes, they had nothing to do with his day job, which you'd have to think was pretty interesting, actually.)

But Nancy, like me, is now in the news-digestion business, not the news-reporting business, so her sleuthing was nothing more than curiousity. In one of the columns, she spotted the name of an obscure Dartmouth professor -- an odd name, it seemed -- and just out of curiousity ran it through Google. (Googlin' Goeglein, as it were, tee-hee!) And what to her wondering eyes should appear?* An eerily similar 10-year-old essay in the Dartmouth Review, by someone else.

In her blog, she called out Goeglein. As a courtesy, she also tipped off her former editors at the News-Sentinel, who put a team to work on the story. In less than 24 hours, Goeglein copped to the crime, and was unemployed. That's the speed of the Internets for ya, George. To date, 27 of Goeglein's 38 columns have turned up blatant examples of straight-up plaigerism.

I know I'm just adding to a chorus here, but let me add my own, "Way to go, Nancy." Makes me proud to be a colleague. Go click the link to read her initial post -- she writes very well.

*(That's an allusion, not plaigerism, by the way)