James Rainey writes in the Los Angeles Times today about bylines—the credit writers receive at the top (or the bottom) of their work. It’s an interesting world of arcana, and one of those professional vanities we afford ourselves. We used to think that most readers frankly don’t give a toss about bylines, and we still think that—generally speaking. Like anything else, if the product is good, people want to know the brand. If it is unremarkable, they have no reason to care.
The common line among journalists is that readers DO care, because they develop a taste and loyalty for particular writers. It’s a nice thought, but probably delusional. We have wasted many words in this particular space identifying and describing writers who we think are tops—but we’re writing for ourselves and for a small minority of obsessive-compulsives who want more inside dope on the magazine and the magazine industry.
If readers DO develop loyalties based on byline, there are two points we wish to make: First, we sincerely hope that byline readers do not disqualify writers they don’t recognize. Second, they surely end up favoring just a handful of writers—how many favorite writers can one person have at any one time? (Incidentally, we think the number is around six—also, this number is counterbalanced by about six bylines that really do send us quickly to another page.) So is it worth publishing a hundred bylines in order to please six readers desperately seeking six writers?
We occasionally are asked why we do things the way we do them here, with regard to bylines. (By the way, these questions have come almost exclusively from writers.) We do not put writer’s bylines on our cover because we don’t think enough readers care about bylines to justify the space dedicated to the ego of one person. As another twist of logic, we feel that selective bylines on the cover subtly devalue stories that are not pitched on the strength of the writer’s name.
There are a couple places inside the magazine where we don’t use bylines on editorial content. The first one is “Good Intentions,” the first item in the magazine. For lack of a better term, this piece is a sort of letter from the editor—although it is intended not to be a vacuous, self-serving exercise in self-promotion, the way most editor’s notes are in most magazines. Instead, it is supposed to be a substantive commentary on some pressing issue of the day—issued in the old-fashioned editorial “we.” The point is, this welcoming mat to the rest of the magazine is a sort of institutional statement that we want to reflect the personality and voice of the magazine, not any single contributor. (For what it’s worth, we—and by we, I mean I—write this piece each month. For certain technical reasons, we typically byline this piece when it appears on the website.) Big fans of magazines and magazine history will recognize a couple of inspirations for Good Intentions—most obviously, Spy magazine’s “Great Expectations” which served the same purpose, though it ran quite a lot longer and ranged more broadly into issues of the day. Might magazine also started this way. And the New Yorker of the thirties began “Talk of the Town” with “Notes and Commentary”—also an unbylined statement of editorial views and anecdotes, whose greatest practitioner was E.B. White.
Now, the other place where we don’t use bylines is in Broken Clock, the section that describes arts and entertainment events during the present month. The main reason we don’t use bylines here is that most of these pieces are very slight, and contributed by staff members who have their bruised egos salved by The Big Bucks. We wanted this section, too, to reflect the institutional voice of the magazine (we use the editorial “we” here as well).
Pragmatically speaking, this kind of section runs the very real danger of reading like a phone book, with all kinds of raw information—phone numbers, web addresses, street addresses, dates, and so on—so that we wanted to eliminate any extraneous distractions. (It’s the same reason we don’t print the record labels or publishing houses behind titles that we are recommending; how many readers choose their books and CDs based on the media company that produced them? We thought so, too. There are good reasons we might reconsider this policy though, which we won’t go into here.)
Now we have heard a great hew and cry from freelance writers about this policy, and we’re sorry about that. (Well, no, not a great hew and cry. There have been six complaints in three years, two from the same writer.) We feel their pain, but we also insist that the quality of the writing is far more important than the quality of the byline.
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