byline
Bylines are used to give credit to writers who pen articles for print or online publications. They can take multiple forms and come either at the beginning of an article or the end. A byline typically names the person who wrote the article and sometimes gives that person’s position at the publication.
Credit for authorship might also appear as part of an editor’s note that describes the story’s content or offers some contextualization about why the story is important or how it was acquired. In that case the credit is not considered a byline. Credit may also be given at the end of a story as a signature. In that case it usually runs flush right (aligned to the right-hand margin).
The signature is the oldest form of authorship credit used in American newspapers. This sort of credit line dates back to the colonial era, when readers anticipated most content to be written by a newspaper editor. If the editor commissioned or received (usually through the mail) a letter from a correspondent, he would generally use the signature to signal to readers that the piece was not his own. Many 18th- and 19th-century authors wrote under pseudonyms (pen names).
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Pseudonyms were important in the colonial and Revolutionary eras to protect dissidents from retaliation by English officials. Journalism has always been a dangerous occupation, and in earlier times readers and subjects with grievances against newspaper writers did not sue them for libel. They challenged them to duels, made lethal visits to their offices, or ambushed them in the street. Anonymity was the reporter’s friend, and a pseudonym was the key to that anonymity.
One of the best examples from early U.S. history is the Federalist papers. The Federalist papers are a collection of 85 articles written by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay under the shared pseudonym Publius. The three wrote the letters to help get the Constitution ratified. The letters appeared in the New York Independent Journal, the New York Packet, and the Daily Advertiser between October 1787 and April 1788. However, they were not the only, nor the first, writers to use newspapers either before, during, or after the American Revolution to argue political issues. In the 1730s a series of essays criticizing New York Governor William Cosby appeared in the New York Weekly Journal under pseudonyms such as “Cato.” These pieces were written by members of an anti-Cosby faction, including James Alexander and Lewis Morris. The essays led to the arrest and trial of the Journal’s publisher, John Peter Zenger, for libel. His acquittal was the first important victory for freedom of the press in Britain’s American colonies.
Women writers, in particular, have chosen to write under either pseudonyms or their initials. Women in the 17th and 18th centuries tended to use masculine pseudonyms, thinking they would be taken more seriously than if they used a feminine name. In the 19th century many women published under pseudonyms or initials, including some who wrote about the American Civil War in Southern newspapers. Louisa McCord of South Carolina, a proslavery writer and contributor to Southern magazines such as De Bow’s Review and the Southern Quarterly Review, wrote under her initials, though her authorship was likely recognized by some readers.
Consistent use of bylines began during the Civil War when Union General Joseph Hooker became enraged over a story that included information about the manpower and location of his Army of the Potomac. The general complained to the U.S. War Department, and the result was General Order No. 48, which required all reporters to sign their correspondence at least with their initials, if not their full names. Northern newspapers complied for the duration of the war.
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The Associated Press and most newspapers had no byline policies until the early 20th century. In part, the decision not to use bylines or to use them sparingly was made by publishers who believed the newspaper, not the individual reporter, was responsible for each story. In his work The Pen and the Book (1899), Sir Walter Besant, a British historian, argued that signed articles led writers to think of themselves first and their story second. Also, up until about the 1970s or 1980s, newspapers employed reporters who gathered news and phoned it in to a rewrite person, so many stories would have needed a double byline.
Adolph Ochs, publisher of The New York Times from 1896 until his death in 1935, eschewed bylines until the 1920s when the paper’s position on the issue began changing, as did that of many other publications. The first Associated Press byline appeared in 1925. The term byline first appeared in print in 1926 in Ernest Hemingway’s novel The Sun Also Rises.
Arguments in favor of bylines have focused on holding journalists responsible for their reporting. Unsigned pieces are more likely to allow a reporter to engage in irresponsible reporting, argued John Bertram Askew in a 1911 edition of a periodical that dealt with journalistic controversies, Pros and Cons. A 2012 article by Reuters writer Jack Shafer argued that bylines are a positive for news organizations because they tell readers the identity of authors and do, in fact, hold writers accountable for what they report. The article essentially paints bylines as one antidote for accusations of “fake news.” It also points out that bylines help good journalists advance faster in their careers because their work is a known quantity.
However, the modern prevalence of bylines has presented new ethical issues for journalists: fake bylines and accusations of plagiarism when bylines are not fully inclusive of everyone who worked on a story. Such an issue arose in 2012 with a Chicago-based company, Journatic. The company provided local news to newspapers throughout the United States by outsourcing assignments to freelancers who worked remotely. Mostly these remote reporters picked up publicly available information such as real estate transfers, marriage, and death records and other information easily obtained from the Internet. Even some of the top papers in the United States subscribed to Journatic, including the Chicago Tribune, the Houston Chronicle, Newsday, and the San Francisco Chronicle.
Many of Journatic’s reporters worked overseas in places such as the Philippines, the former Soviet Union, or Africa. Instead of publishing under their own names, Journatic reporters took American-sounding pseudonyms for their bylines. While such a practice might have been deemed acceptable 200 years ago, today it is considered unethical. Journatic pledged to stop its use of fake bylines after being caught and losing clients such as the Chicago Sun-Times and GateHouse Media.
Despite the acknowledged value of bylines, some publications still choose not to use them. Perhaps the most famous is The Economist, a London-based weekly news magazine. The Economist defends its policy of not using bylines as tradition, citing the fact many of their articles are the product of collaborations between writers and taking the Ochsian view that what is written is more important than who writes it. The paper does allow its online writers to sign their articles with their initials, and occasional special reports in the print edition are bylined as well.
The original version of this article was published by SAGE Publications in The SAGE Encyclopedia of Journalism.