It's just too darn easy these days to do research for an article. Google seems to be making original reporting obsolete.

Ralph Hanson, a journalism professor at West Virginia University, recently received a personal lesson in journalism in the age of the internet when a friend mentioned seeing his quote in a column by conservative commentator Michelle Malkin. The only problem was Hanson had never spoken with Malkin. What was going on?

His retrospective column in today's Charleston (WV) Daily Mail, tracing back how his quote ended up in Malkin's column and how its context skewed a little bit with each new version, is a good cautionary tale about how journalism is being changed by the idea that everything on the web is fair game for others' use--or misuse as the case may be.

As Hanson concludes, "Anytime I tell people I'm a journalism professor, they immediately tell me a story about how a journalist got his or her story wrong. My experience was different. What I found was that the original reporter got the story right. But like a children's game of 'telephone,' the story slowly got distorted the more times it was retold."

What's the line between fair use and plagiarism these days, anyway? Somewhere it separates between Jayson Blair and Michelle Malkin, but how close either was to the line is anyone's guess.