While many are up in arms after the mayor of West Valley City for three months wrote under a pen name for the Deseret News, he came clean about how he came to do so. Legally and morally there isn’t anything wrong with what the mayor did to bring to light what he did to run for the same position in another Utah city.
There are at least 30 people I know that use pen names to write freelance articles for Internet sites. I know a handful of these people use pen names to write self-published books in genres they want to keep separate from the professional pen names. This is no different from what Mayor Winder did with his freelance writing career. Nor is it a crime as he feels it has become considering outing himself.
Those in his current city that understood why he went out of his way to write under a pen name, others felt that Winder had other secrets. Those who are wondering about his other secrets should stop worrying about that because everyone has secrets.
There are other newspapers across the country who use freelance writers to fill the positions that were cut due to cuts in the economy. Other sites online and some offline papers like the Deseret News accept freelance writers to cover stories at a fraction of the cost or for free.
Winder was in part wise to disclose the fact he wrote under a pen name and how he made it happen. This leads to other questions that could fault the paper too. Why didn’t the news paper check his pen name out?
The Utah paper feels he misrepresented himself when he brought what he had done. Clark Gilbert president and CEO of the paper and it’s digital media company regrets the mayor using a pen name to write upbeat items for their paper.
When Winder asked about freelance writers using pen names when he decided to out himself, the paper told him they didn’t have any rules in place for freelance writers using pen names. I don’t understand why Gilbert would feel regret about what the mayor had done when there weren’t rules put in place before hand.
Will Mayor Winder’s writing under a pen name now change how other papers and Internet content sites change how they operate with freelance writers? More than likely not since this has been going on since the time Mark Twain started writing.