Newspaper lifts TheFacebook.com photos

Note to all reporters, college students, and anyone else who might be interested in a little plagiarism: The Internet is not your friend.

In the latest bit of Keystone Kops-like use of the Net, a front-page column at a small North Carolina paper has apparently been lifting photos from the hugely popular college social networking site TheFacebook.com, and reprinting them along with invented "man-on-the-street" quotes.

Now, this sort of thing might work for The Onion, but in this case it didn't take long for the students pictured, some of whom were still in North Carolina, to notice and ask The Reidsville Review newspaper what exactly was going on. According to the Greensboro News-Record, the smaller paper said the matter has been dealt with internally, and apologies have been made to the people whose photos were used.

No real harm done, except of course in exacerbating the ongoing credibility problems that journalism seems to having on a daily basis. So, everyone, please remember. Maybe in the old days, you could hide things on the Net. Today, someone is practically guaranteed to find your mistakes or errors, whether it's the person you copied doing a vanity Google search, or a legion of bloggers ferreting out the truth.