In a suburb outside of Salt Lake City, Utah, the Republican mayor has admitted to using a fake name to write newspaper stories promoting "good news" about the town, according to The Cutline. The scandal has prompted questions about standards of accountability for vetting citizen journalists.

West Valley Mayor Mike Winder used the pseudonym Richard Burwash -- not to mention a photo found via a search of Google images -- to write more than a dozen stories over two years for the Deseret News, Oquirrh Times and KSL.com, reported the Associated Press and the Deseret News. Winder quoted himself, NPR added, and the New Yorker said Winder even created a Facebook page for his "fake persona."

"My motive was to try to restore balance in the Deseret News' coverage of my city," said Winder, as quoted by that newspaper.

Winder said he stopped using the pen-name to submit freelance articles when he learned that the newspaper didn't accept pieces under false bylines, and eventually his "conscience got to" him, according to the Salt Lake City Tribune. Winder was submitting articles via Deseret Connect, an experiment set up to encourage citizen journalism as a way to offset cutbacks in the newsroom.

"This is not a case of an artist using a pen name," said an editorial in the Salt Lake City Tribune. "This is a case of a public official seeking to deceive both the news media and the people who rely on them for information that is, if not totally unbiased, then at least filtered through writers and editors who are not secretly the subjects of the articles they publish. The managers of the Deseret News and Deseret Connect have some hard thinking to do about whether their new business model will really be successful if it must bear the label caveat lector. (Let the reader beware.)"

Writing for US News, Susan Milligan pointed out that the Winder case of deception highlights the "dangers of citizen journalism," adding that the reliance on non-professionals is an insult to real reporters. "It's horrifying that the news outlets, perhaps desperate for free work, didn't vet 'Burwash' or even meet him in person...There's a reason for a hiring and vetting process for journalists," she wrote. "And there's a danger to using the work of anonymous (or fake) unpaid individuals who think they can be reporters simply because they own laptops. Photos can be doctored; quotes can be made up. Someone willing to write for free may have a political agenda—as Winder did—that the newspaper unwittingly subsidizes by not paying for the work."