The San Antonio Express-News has a long story about how one of its music writers, Ramiro Burr, had been using a ghost writer to crank out stories for him. Burr quit this week as the paper was finishing up an investigation:

Burr, 52, covered the local and international music scene for the past 25 years. He worked for the San Antonio Light from 1983 until the Light folded in 1993 and has been with the Express-News since. He is also a local correspondent for Billboard magazine and in 1999 wrote a book, the “Billboard Guide to Tejano and regional Mexican music.”

“Ramiro caused the Express-News to unknowingly publish work under his name that was not, in fact, his own work,” said Robert Rivard, editor of the Express-News.

“It was the work of at least one other writer who did not receive credit and who we did not know about. Ramiro decided on his own to resign just as our investigation was concluding and we were preparing to take appropriate action. We have a zero-tolerance policy whenever someone on our staff presents work as their own that is not their own.”

(Link via Romenesko.) His unorthodox arrangement began to unravel when the writer he’d been paying to ghostwrite stories and columns started clamoring for credit. The irony—a journalist unclear on the nature of his job getting burned by a ghostwriter unclear on the nature of his—is small but worth noting. Barr had hired a lawyer and had apparently at least started to muster a defense but eventually gave up. As the paper notes, his apology fell a little short.

Burr’s resignation came 24 hours after his lawyer, Glenn D. Levy, sent Rivard a letter contending that Burr is a syndicated columnist and the Express-News “never questioned” how he performed his duties.

“The San Antonio Express-News has openly approved of his work and even promoted his syndicated columns,” Levy wrote, citing language from Burr’s biography on MySA.com, the newspaper’s Web site.

However, calling it a “difficult situation,” Burr threw in the towel Tuesday. In a brief statement, he was somewhat contrite, but stuck to the claim that he was governed by a different set of rules than other Express-News journalists.

“I may have been a little overzealous, or overreached in trying to be the best reporter/syndicated columnist I could be,” he said. “I sincerely apologize for breaking any rules.

“Like all the other publications and online sites I write and have written for, the San Antonio Express-News has been good to me. I wish them all the best.”

The story also charges that Burr had an unusual relationship with a local PR firm, saying that he had his own computer at its offices and that the ghost writer, Douglas Shannon, worked out of the firm as Burr’s quote-unquote intern. The story says Shannon formally asked for credit for the stories; presumably, he had already been bugging Burr for it and finally went public.

The paper in the lede says that the problem involved more than 100 stories since 2001, which averages out to about 15 a year, but read down and it turns out that they were concentrated in a period of about 18 months, starting at the end of 2001. Most of these were a weekly “Latin Notes” music column, but it seems Burr also farmed out a feature once a month or so.

The Express-News is owned by Hearst; San Antonio doesn’t get paid much attention to nationally, but its now the seventh-largest city in the U.S. Seems odd Burr’s editors at the paper never got a whiff that he hadn’t written the things, or that he had his own intern working out of another building.