Spit on a Stranger

As a journalism geek, I love looking at bylines. First and foremost, hard work deserves credit. Much like actual sourcing, it also keeps the reporter and newspaper honest. And one trend I'm happy to see The Post not embrace is running stories without them.

Newspapers inevitably receive way too many news releases, and far more than the number of reporters. Many publications will simply print the release as-is or in a slightly edited form with something like "Staff" as the byline, if there is one at all. Granted, when this is the case, there wasn't really a reporter to credit, per se.

But there's still something lacking there. When stories run without bylines, the reader has no one to give feedback to for the piece. If there's an error, the reader will likely have to pass his or her comments along to the news editor, who has more work to do than can be done in an eight hour work day.

It's also tougher to determine a bias. Speaking for the stories that do have a source to them or some other form of original reporting, there's no way to know who did that interview. For all the reader knows, it could have been a reporter who happened to be a member of the club he or she was writing about. That's highly unethical, obviously, but what indication is there otherwise?

Even minor amounts of work deserve a tag-line. I've rewritten many police news releases and waited around for hours for a source to call back with nothing to show for it. A minor tag-line should come of that. Whatever small acclaim, by pure chance, comes from a byline, I say great. On a lot of days in journalism, seeing your name in print is all the good news there is.