America at LargeNot quite two months ago the owner-publishers of a couple of fly-by-night internet sports sites called ColdHardFootballFacts.com and BostonSportsMedia.com issued a joint communique in which they invited their readers to besiege the editors of the Boston Globe with e-mails demanding the dismissal of sports reporter Ron Borges.

"They're already chiselling a Ron Borges bust and reserving a special place of dishonour for it in the Hack Hall of Fame," read the online entreaty.

"BostonSportsMedia.com and ColdHardFootballFacts.com have teamed up today to waive the five-year waiting period and expedite his induction - and we're asking for your help. All you have to do is e-mail Boston Globe management and other concerned parties and demand that Borges be fired."

And what, exactly, did the websites have against Ron Borges? Any reasonable reading would conclude that, mainly, they just didn't like what he was writing in the newspaper.

That call to arms was issued on January 12th, and to outward appearances it would seem to have become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Two days ago the Globe suspended Borges for two months.

The crime in question was plagiarism, the ultimate journalistic sin - specifically, that a March 4th football notes column purportedly authored by Borges included at least three lengthy passages detailing the off-season plans of the Seattle Seahawks which appeared to have been lifted, verbatim, from one written by Mike Sando of the Tacoma News-Tribune a week earlier.

Now, if you compare the two stories side-by-side it would seem to be a slam-dunk, but nothing in this day and age is quite as simple as it seems. It isn't that the rules of journalism have changed, but the means of news-gathering in the age of the blogosphere have made some issues more complex.

In bygone years we might have sat down to chat with the participants in the run-up to a major prizefight. Nowadays the more common practice is for the promoters to arrange a teleconference call with the boxers and their trainers, the results of which are available to all participants. When a sportswriter attributes a quote to, let's say, Oscar De La Hoya, you can probably take it that Oscar actually said it, but not necessarily in response to a question posed by the author of the story. In fact, somewhat infuriatingly, it may more often have been in response to a question posed by, say, me.

Over the past couple of decades, in part to compensate for the obvious advantages enjoyed by 24-hour television sports programming, American newspapers have featured weekly "notebook" columns on various sports - not just the day-to-day machinations of the home team, but the comings and goings on other teams in that league, be it the NFL, the NBA or Major League Baseball.

And since no newsman - at least no newsman not named Peter Gammons - could reasonably be expected to have phone calls returned on a weekly basis from every general manager in the country, the authors of these "insider" columns have come to share information with one another.

In some cases this chummy relationship has been semi-formalised through what have come to be known as "notes collaboratives". I've never belonged to a notes collaborative myself, but my understanding is that the beat writers on a given sport - in this case, football - get together once a week to pool their titbits. The net result is that it makes the author of the notes column look a lot smarter than he is, in the eyes of his readers as well as those of his bosses.

These cluster-plucks used to take place by telephone. Now they are more efficiently conducted by e-mail.

And it isn't as if this goes on behind editors' backs.

The Boston Globe, for one, routinely runs a disclaimer beneath its Sunday notebook columns acknowledging, "Material from personal interviews, wire services, other beat writers and league and team sources was used in this report". The football writer from a daily in another US city who first alerted me to Borges' impending sentencing belongs to the same information-sharing network the Globe sportswriter and Sando do, and he told me his newspaper actually pays for his subscription to the "notes collaborative" and that, moreover, he would be surprised if the Globe didn't pick up the tab for Borges' participation as well.

"I have no way of knowing exactly how this happened, but I have a pretty good idea," said the football scribe. "You're expected to provide your information in notebook form, but sometimes guys get lazy and just post their own notes column instead.

"And while any of us are free to use the information, it's expected that you're going to interpret it and rewrite it to suit the needs of whatever you're writing. But under deadline pressure a guy might be tempted to just grab a whole sentence or even paragraph of what is supposed to be background information and use it verbatim," he explained. "Say one guy gets lazy on his end and the other guy doesn't realise what he's done? All it takes is a couple of clicks of the mouse and you've got instant plagiarism."

I have no way of knowing that this is what happened, either, but it doesn't sound like a bad theory. Joe Sullivan, the Globe's sports editor, would seem to have acknowledged as much when he admitted to having given Borges' participation in the "notes collaborative" his blessing.

In other words, one could make a pretty good case for Borges having been scapegoated for a practice the Globe implicitly condoned, or at the very least turned a blind eye to.

Interestingly, though, the issue was not the result of an investigation on the part of either the Globe or the Tacoma News-Tribune. In its account of Borges' suspension, the Associated Press noted that "the allegations of plagiarism first arose on a website, ColdHardFootballFacts.com". And since in this instance the website plainly had an agenda of its own, we can probably assume that striking a blow for journalistic integrity was not its prime motive in blowing the whistle.