Fake bylines

You cannot be serious.

The credibility of a proven reporter, for one reason.

 

Eeess Peggy, how can I help you? Journaleestic eentegrity? Hold please!

 

It's not about anyone "overrating" anything.

It's about the credibility of the work. If a company won't even put the real name of the employee doing it on the copy they're generating, and is making up entirely fake names to hide the source of the copy they're putting out, who knows what else about their work isn't valid.

 

You mean when I write in to Dear Abby, no one named Abby gets my letter?

 

The first paper I worked at had a couple stringers who did this because they didn't want their papers to know they were stringing for us.

Early in my career, I was covering a minor sport and covering it for four different papers (my boss knew about it and would throw stringing work my way all the time) and one editor asked me if I wanted to leave out my byline that would be fine and I said, "No, it's OK, all of the papers I'm stringing for know that I'm doing this for more than one paper..."

 

I suppose I'd better make it clear: Johnny Dangerously is not my real name.

 

Jack Shafer's take:

http://blogs.reuters.com/jackshafer/2012/07/06/how-the-byline-beast-was-born/

 

We had a guy who covered for our paper one night because myself (I was SE at the time) and the ME needed to be out of town. He wasn't supposed to work for us, because his day job wouldn't have been happy (the exact reason escapes me, but it is not pertinent to this story). While I was gone, he took a gamer for me and signed the name "Henry Jones, Jr." My ME was pissed. We understood the need to keep his name a secret, but this put it on the level of a joke, and we were the ones facing a credibility hit.

I myself write with a pen name, but people know who I am and I've printed what my real name is. I use a pen name only because my real name is complicated to say, and it is just what I go by to make things easier for everyone. It really comes down to credibility. If you don't know who is writing the story, why do you believe it?

 

Because of who runs it.

I have NO idea of most of the AP writers these days, but I trust the AP bug on a story.

If it's a "Mark Twain, Staff Writer" byline in my local paper, I believe it.

It's the outlet or the newspaper service I go with, not the name attached. You think your average reader knows the reporters by name?

Yeah, there are exceptions, but for the most part, readers don't know bylines. And they don't care.

In the example here, I wouldn't give the bylines a second thought. I think it's stupid that the whole reason Journatic did it was to make the bylines seem more "American," though. It's not like Filippino names are somehow un-American.

 

I have thought the same. TV and radio are personality driven. Newspapers and magazines are not. I can easily ramble off the names of just about every anchor (and most reporters) on the local stations and ESPN, NBCSN. I'd have a hard time doing that with print publications.

 

Well, with the AP bug, you're basically bylining it as "Associated Press." Why not just put something like "Special to the Podunk Times" or something like that, if we must farm out crap. That anyone sees no problem with putting out a fake name on something that's not a standing feature like Dear Abby is flabbergasting.

 

I'll disagree some with bylines don't matter. If you have been with a paper for awhile, I believe they do have some value.