Mayor uses alias to write freelance stories quoting himself
I came across this article on Poynter.org about a mayor who used "Richard Burwash" as his alias to write stories about himself. Is this ethical? I never heard of an instance when a freelancer created an alias in order to quote his/herself. The Utah mayor wanted to write about other things than crime and bring more positive news to the community. Although his intentions were good, wouldn't creating an alias to write somewhat of a bias story lose his credibility as a mayor?
Unethical for the mayor - but what about the newspaper exerting so little supervision over the accuracy of its "citizen journalists"? It would be a challenge since this guy was quoting himself so there wouldn't be any complaints on that end! I'm not sure what safeguards you would want to put in place. Face to face meetings? If you have a large number of CJs, that wouldn't work. Running stories past the people written about? It would work for an attempt at real news but not for phony news of the kind you get in a press release. I'll start looking around for examples.
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