6/17/2023 0 Comments Nytimes magazineThe Daily, the paper’s hit podcast, has willingly turned its host, Michael Barbaro, into his generation’s Paul Harvey. It will follow “a reporter or team of journalists as a Times story makes its way toward publication,” Times reporter John Koblin recently wrote. Another TV show, The Weekly, is in the works as a co-production with FX and Hulu. More directly, it has made TV stars of its reporters-Maggie Haberman, Adam Goldman, Michael Schmidt, Glenn Thrush, Mark Mazzetti, Matt Apuzzo and others-by cooperating in the production of Liz Garbus’ Showtime documentary series about the paper, The Fourth Estate. The Times has encouraged this cult of reportorial personality by allowing its reporters to fill hours of screen time on the cable news channels, talking about their own stories and the stories by their competitors. ![]() Most days, the Times places on its “Inside the Times” feature, which is usually a first-person piece by a reporter who explains how he broke some story. Readers became savvy to the notion that bylines-like a well-written headline-could serve as a guide on what to read and what to ignore.īylines have never been more important at the Times than under Executive Editor Dean Baquet, who has scrapped the last remnants of the paper’s old gray ladyness by showcasing its writers as near-celebrities. Byline detractors still maintained that signed articles promoted the egos of the writers at the expense of the primacy of the article, but the war was lost. By the 1970s, long after his demise, the paper brimmed with them. Ochs slowly yielded to the lure of the byline over the decades. “Bylines on stories were virtually nonexistent, and no editor, reporter or business manager was permitted to have stationery with his name on it.” Jones wrote in their history of the paper, The Trust: The Private and Powerful Family Behind the New York Times. “Adolph had an ironclad policy on who got individual credit at the New York Times, insisting that ‘the business of the paper must be absolutely impersonal,’” Susan E. Adolph Ochs, who bought the Times in 1896, resisted the trend toward personalization to the nth degree. ![]() The Times’ competitors at the New York World and the New York Journal hyped the work of their best writers-Richard Harding Davis, Sylvester Scovel, Ambrose Bierce, Nellie Bly and Stephen Crane to name a few-by featuring their names on their pieces. The paper took its time getting there: The New York Times was a late-comer to the byline craze that swept American journalism in the 1890s. The move runs counter to a couple decades of fresh thinking at the Times, which has dictated that its reporters should be promoted as brand-name stars to hook subscribers.
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