West Valley City Mayor Mike Winder’s admission he tricked the Deseret News and KSL.com into running stories he wrote under a fake name has exposed the danger of relying on citizen journalists to make up for manpower shortages as some newspapers try to gather information they can’t get any other way.
The mayor’s mea culpa has generated a mix of scorn and sympathy for the LDS Church-owned News, which has turned to untrained contributors to produce news, opinion and other information for its readers through a network called Deseret Connect. The move came after a massive layoff last year that cut its staff of professional reporters and editors almost in half. The paper also shifted away from time-honored news reporting to emphasize what it says is values-oriented journalism written for readers of faith.
“What Winder did was he exposed the fraud that Deseret Connect is. They are not up front with where these stories are coming from. [The writers] are essentially freelancers who make the audience feel like [the paper has] a staff, and that’s not true anymore,” said Kim Zarkin, assistant professor of communication at Westminster College in Salt Lake City.
...or has it just become an extension of the Ensign?