I pulled my byline

Billy Corgan could've been a sportswriter. Ever hear him on "The Sportswriters on TV"? The dude knows his shit.

 

Talk to your editor.

 

You should take the information that was rewritten or removed and create a new article in the format you prefer.

Then, if the paper is not interested in that article, you could threaten to "go rogue." If you choose that option, please continue to post about how that goes.

 

In this day and age of cuts and everybody's motivation online hits, it's best to not even read your final copy. Seriously. If you work for a newspaper today, you pretty much are working for people with no traditional news background. They want what they want. Just turn it in and move on to the next story. Why read it? It's just going to anger you and quality work isn't going to keep you employed in this day and age of cuts. It's video and clicks and retweets so why invest yourself in it? This is not a profession anymore run by newspaper professionals. It's run by beancounters and company heads who have all the wrong motivations regarding writing a good story. Get your story in on time, write a clickbait headline on it and press on to the next one. You'll be laid off when they want you gone anyway, why speed the process by doing something stupid like removing a byline?

 

Just because.

 

Once when I was first starting out, I wrote a Friday night gamer on one of our in-town high school football teams. The guy above me in the pecking order -- it was my first fall; he'd been there two or three years and had one of our secondary college beats -- decided to rewrite it. Our sports editor had been on him to get his quotes into his stories earlier, so he decided that was what my story needed. Maybe it did -- I don't remember -- but I'm certain it didn't need what was originally the second paragraph moved to the very end.

Because that paragraph had the score in it.

 

Which of you was Employee A, and which was Employee B?

 

Neither was Employee No. 8

 

Well not if the recount turns things around.

 

He's always good when Howard Stern interviews him. supposedly a good hs wrestler also.

 

I'd be peeved, too, but at least someone still reads your copy and makes edits, unlike a good number of folks in the business nowadays.

 

I certainly don't agree with the whole "let editors do whatever they want without asking" sentiment. The best editors don't make big changes to a piece without some sort of interaction with the writer.