THE BLAIR SWITCH PROJECT: Another

THE BLAIR SWITCH PROJECT: Another Jayson Blair pops up, this time at a small town newspaper in Missouri:

A sports writer for a small-town Missouri newspaper has been fired for plagiarizing sports columns and a movie review written by nationally syndicated film critic Roger Ebert.

Michael Kinney, 29, was fired by The Sedalia Democrat after an investigation prompted by a reader who called the paper last month to report similarities between a movie review by Kinney and one written by Ebert.

Editor Oliver Wiest, in a special column published Sunday, said he fired Kinney June 5.

The Democrat is a daily newspaper with a circulation of about 11,800 in Sedalia, a central Missouri town 100 miles (160 kilometers) east of Kansas City.

Wiest said he searched the Internet and “found several similar instances of plagiarism from online sources in Mr. Kinney’s movie reviews dating back to late last year.”

(Link found via The Internet Movie Database.)