Early last week the Washington Post unveiled a conservative blog, "Red America," on its site authored by 24-year-old Ben Domenech. Domenech's previous experience consisted of writing for National Review magazine and he was one of the co-founders of the popular blog-community Redstate.org.

By Friday, Domenech had resigned after it was discovered that he had committed the unforgivable sin of journalism -- he was a plagiarist.

You can find a couple of good link round-ups here and here courtesy of the Instapundit. Also see these bits from Don Surber here and here. (Surber is applying for Domenech's job, but I think I'm going to too. Surber lists as part of his resume that he got West Virginia Senator Bob Byrd mad at him. Sorry, degree of difficulty on that one is pretty low -- especially when you consider Surber's a conservative and Byrd isn't. I, on the other hand, got Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens mad at me when I was only a year out of j-school. So, to quote Bill Murray: "I got that going for me.")

I just want to say a couple of things about this case. First, though people like Surber probably have a decade or two on me -- and I've got a decade on Domenech -- I think too many newspaper executives nowadays have abandoned the idea of "paying dues." You've got one of the nation's most respected newspapers (and I think the semantics that Post executives play with the dot-com being separate and distinct from the paper is a foolish cop-out) hiring a 24-year-old to write a column on the news pages. Frankly, I'd be surprised if Domenech ever covered a water board or city council meeting as a professional journalist before being hired at the Post.

There's something to be said for working your way up the ladder. When I was in j-school, the career path was laid out for all of the wannabe journalists: Spend a year or two at a small, podunk paper (Lompoc Record, circulation: 8,000); spend another couple years at a larger paper (The Daily World, circulation 17,000), then go to larger dailies (North County Times, circulation 96,000; The San Diego Union-Tribune, circulation 350,000). You could probably skip a step or two if you were a minority, but that's basically the journalistic career path. I went to a minority job fair shortly before I graduated from college (no, I'm not a minority, but their flyers never said it was for minorities and they already had my money by the time I found out, so I went anyway) and met with the recruiter for the Union-Tribune. His message to me was that the paper won't even take a look at your resume until you have five years of professional experience.

That has certainly changed -- and it's not always to journalism's benefit.

Second, the Post has received some flak over Domenech's hiring because the paper allegedly failed to vet him properly and uncover the plagiarism before is turned into a public relations disaster. I don't buy it. While plagiarism is easier to detect than it was before the advent of the Internet and the Google search engine, it is still a pretty time-intensive procedure. Domenech's plagiarism was discovered because you had hundreds, and maybe thousands, of people copying phrase after phrase into search engines to see what would pop up. To expect an employer to go through that sort of vetting process for every employee they hire is simply unreasonable.

Third, I was honestly shocked at the level of vitriol and hatred that emanated from the left over the mere fact of a conservative hiring by the Post. I suppose I should not be surprised after the four-plus years I've spent in the blogosphere, but the death threats and "your mother" type insults were simply out of bounds. If you needed further evidence that the left is mad (both in the insane and angry sense) at the margin -- basically the "grassroots" -- then last week's outburst was sufficient.

For those of you who can't get enough of Hoystory and would like to see me writing full-time, send an e-mail to the Post encouraging them to hire me. (E-mail [email protected].)