New York Times' "byline beast"

422 probably barely beats me, but I work 25 hours of desk during the offseason.

 

I've got to say, anybody on a major college beat probably has 400-plus bylines a year pretty easily, if they're doing the job well. But you have to remember, you might have anywhere from 5-10 bylines in a special section. Times five or six (per year) depending on the success of the basketball football teams. You've got notebooks. Sidebars. Quick-hit sidebars to advances or gamers. Short recruiting stories.

Ryan Reynolds in Evansville, where you at!? I remember my days as a younger reporter when we took pride in the soaring story counts like that, although that's no guarantee of quality.

However, I don't want to diminish the work of the writer profiled here. It's one thing to slap out 400-450 sports stories a year. It's another thing to churn out that volume for The New York Times. I like to believe that busting your rear end can still get you somewhere in this business, so I say he deserves all the notice he can get.

 

At that age, I was setting myself up to repeat that year's math course as a senior. I hate math.

I'd be a lot more impressed if everyone on this board had been raving for months about this guy's work. Quantity's good. Quality's better.

Not saying he doesn't have it. The numbers alone just don't do it for me.

 

Sorry, Mr. Crawford. Just noticed this post.

The tops I ever got to, I believe, was the mid-400s for one year, and that was in 2001, a year that included coverage of the McVeigh execution, and some deal in September.

Though not a one of those ever had a more interesting lead than a column another guy wrote from one of our old papers, the Evansville Press.

Its beginning:

"Let's talk urine."

 

Byline counts are dumb. Naturally, a baseball beat writer who does a gamer and notebook off every game will have more bylines than the investigative reporter who spends six months tracking down people involved in a scandal, and a cops reporter who write four 10-inch crime stories a shift will have more bylines than a projects writer who spends four months with a family of a cancer patient all for just one 60-inch lead and 12-inch sider.

I give no credibility to byline count as a criteria to judge a reporter.

 

At one stop the ME had an MBA, which explains everything: MBAs like to count things. They want things tthat are quantifiable and the quality of a story cannot be quantified.

That said, the newsies were expected to produce 10 bylined stories a week, and it didn't matter if you were on the education beat and it was the middle of summer. If you came up short you had to have a damned good reason for it, too, because this douche's count was going to be off. Quality trumps quantity every single time.

 

The people who obsess about story counts are simply fucktards, whether it's the editor who tallies them or the reporter who uses them as justification.

Used properly, they can be effective, but rarely are they used properly.