Byline on gamer when writer doesn't go to the game

The byline signifies original, on-site reporting. (You don't put bylines on re-fashioned news releases, either.) Putting a byline on what is traditionally regarded as the "gamer," if the reporter wasn't present, is misleading. Even if putting a byline on a gamer that wasn't personally staffed signifies nothing to 99.9 percent of the readers, it's a poor practice, professionally speaking.

If the product of a non-staffed "gamer" is more of what is traditionally called a second-day take or what we'd call a "live feature" -- a feature/profile of someone wrapped inside the report of the athlete's most recent game -- that is different. In that case, byline is appropriate, but no dateline if the site of the game wasn't local.

 

Former sports reporter here ... For the daily I worked for, I was the main rewrite guy on my shifts, handling two DI universities (the non-revs on rewrite), an NAIA university and preps. Byline was "From Staff Reports" and there was a dateline. For the nondaily I worked for (covering preps), byline with no dateline if I didn't attend. Most of those stories were league/division roundups, anyway.

 

This is now the standard for a dateline.

Readers have never understood that in the past the story was "filed" from such dateline. They look at it as the place where the story took place. It's common sense really, and after decades of doing something nobody understood, newspapers have started to adopt the dateline as a place of the story's origin and not the place where the story was filed.

 

From the SID side, we have the same principle for when I do a full gamer -- no byline on the gamer unless I'm there.

Case in point. Bethune-Cookman vs. Nebraska.

I didn't make the trip because we felt it was better to spend to send our photographer to capture the images of once in a lifetime game. Also, I had a volleyball senior tonight and a tennis tournament and those are my primary sports. No runzas for me. No big deal. Volleyball and tennis are my guys and gals.

I knew what would happen -- Boss had logistical clusterfraks and they were scrambling to get back to the charter. "Dan, need a gamer. Lunch next week."

No problem.

Here's the deal, I churned a very passable 700-word gamer off of quotes and play-by-play that would have been practically the same had I been in Lincoln. You can only do so much with 45-9.

Lincoln dateline? Yes. Didn't put a byline on it, but I did get one on my follow column, the chance to do a phone interview w/Tom Osborne for the pregame show and some really delicious wings on Wednesday. Worked out just fine.

 

In an instance like this, my newspaper uses the dateline. It freaking tells where the damn game was. But, we would use "Staff report" rather than a byline of the person who wrote it. This is supposed to distinguish that we were not there. I think readers have figured this out as they have asked about it over time.

 

Shoot, "Mr. Staff Reports" is our busiest sports writer these days.

Here's a follow-up question, though. During football season I've had three games to chase down on Friday night in addition to whatever one I was at. I'd occasionally do drive-bys on the other coaches afterward if they were playing in town. Swing by the fieldhouse or, in the case of one coach, his actual house (it was right on the way back to the office from another field and he preferred to do it there instead of sitting around at the field for an extra 15-20 minutes). I'm not at the game, but still doing in-person reporting legwork. Is a byline acceptable for those? I never used to do it, but I think I did it some this year.

 

This is going back almost a decade now, but when I worked in a college publications office, this was our approach as well. We did countless stories on students pursuing jobs or service initiatives in their hometown or on alumni in their latest endeavors, and almost all of our reporting was done from the office via phone or e-mail. When we weaved our interviews into a story, we always tacked on a dateline, even if the events took place in the city we were in.

 

In cases like this, where does everyone's publication stand on putting the byline above the article versus at the bottom? I recall some instances where the primary reporter would cover an event remotely, or even cases where they were there in person but had their dispatches substantially rewritten, and got an italicized "...contributed to this report" credit beneath the text.

 

Our bylines always go above the story.

 

I always found the dateline on phoner stories odd, unless it was a staff report. We did that on roundups at my first job. My first boss at a past job had to do that on one-source updates with area athletes, which seemed weird.

When I started, there was a theoretical rule that no-interview stories got bylines and one-source phoners weren’t supposed to, but usually did, unless it was a called in game or something. Second job might’ve been in the same vein.

The thing that really changed it, showing a shift in the industry was metric tracking. Some of the staff report stuff was the most lucrative. It was the most quick-fire breaking news or odd sort of aggregation (I recall a tipping point in a coaching search, when we posed the question, is ESPN linking candidate X to this job news?). We came up with a workaround to signify, “this is just someone doing the backend stuff, posting the story.” Then corporate said the system wouldn’t take that. Now we have a system where I can indicate credit without a real byline, but the culture change is too deep.

At the start, it was deeply annoying with the print side, as they were half uninterested in how to properly change things and half unable becuase if a shitty hub system. Several should-be staff reports got dumbly bylined.

I’m not sure how I feel about the trend. I think there should be some way to reward someone for staying up to write a late TV gamer, or catching something and posting quickly. The downside is it creates a race for that stuff, even as we realize the current system makes the easy stuff more lucrative.

 

.You're correct State soccer and field hockey quarterfinals (across several classes) taking place today and some games won't be covered because we don't have budget for it. The way we've been doing it if we're not on hand is no byline and no dateline. A byline in my view is fine if its a full-length story with quotes