The SF Weekly’s Matt Smith reports that an unpaid contributor to the San Francisco Examiner’s Web site, Sharon Gray, has been filling her blog with stories from other news sources verbatim and without attribution.

“Gray created the appearance of being an unusually industrious investigative reporter, writer, and photographer, when in fact much of her work consisted of material taken from elsewhere on the Internet,” Smith writes. “This cut-and-paste technique allowed her to post 19 stories in November alone, many of them consisting of news essays of more than 1,000 words with quotes from multiple interviews, and illustrated with numerous photographs taken from around California.”

Examiner Executive Editor Jim Pimentel told Smith that nobody edits the blogs on his paper’s Web site, though the Examiner reserves the right to right to remove blogs that include libel or plagiarism. And Gray’s blog disappeared shortly after Smith started asking the Examiner about it.