The New York Times homepage, without bylines, is pictured. | New York Times screenshot Fourth Estate Does the New York Times Hate Its Reporters? I’m sure it doesn’t. But why did it take their bylines off its home page?

Jack Shafer is Politico’s senior media writer.

The New York Times made a horrible design decision this week, but it could be quickly corrected by pressing a few buttons on its content management system: It scrubbed the bylines for reported pieces from the home page of its website, preserving only the bylines for opinion pieces.

I’m sure the champions of this disfigurement believe that replacing bylines from the home page with white space has—in the cliché-speak of art directors—modernized the site, given it room to breathe, and streamlined and cleaned up its look. They’re probably right, but the new format also denies readers essential information about its news stories that helps us decide whether or not it’s worth clicking through to the articles. Oddly, neither of the two expansive online Times articles presenting the redesign—one introducing it to readers and the other charting how the redesign evolved, mention the elimination of home page bylines.


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. 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 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. Adolph Ochs, who bought the Times in 1896, resisted the trend toward personalization to the nth degree.

“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. Tifft and Alex S. Jones wrote in their history of the paper, The Trust: The Private and Powerful Family Behind the New York Times. “Bylines on stories were virtually nonexistent, and no editor, reporter or business manager was permitted to have stationery with his name on it.”

Ochs slowly yielded to the lure of the byline over the decades. By the 1970s, long after his demise, the paper brimmed with them. 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. 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.

Bylines 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. Most days, the Times places on Page 2 its “Inside the Times” feature, which is usually a first-person piece by a reporter who explains how he broke some story. 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.

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. Another TV show, The Weekly, is in the works as a co-production with FX and Hulu. It will follow “a reporter or team of journalists as a Times story makes its way toward publication,” Times reporter John Koblin recently wrote. The Daily, the paper’s hit podcast, has willingly turned its host, Michael Barbaro, into his generation’s Paul Harvey.

If the personalities of individual reporters have become such an indispensable avenue of entry into the news, why dispense with their bylines? Like the nutritional information printed on the side of a food container, the byline offers a taste of what’s to come. Knowing that a review has been written by Times first-string film critics A.O. Scott or Manohla Dargis conveys all sorts of information about the value of a movie even before you click through to read their pieces. My devotion to Times book critic Dwight Garner is such that I’ll read him on anything—all I need to see is his byline and I’m in.

Times designers aren’t completely oblivious to the value of names. The paper’s columnists and op-ed writers still retain their bylines in the new order, which makes me think there somewhere within the Times bureaucracy at least one editor stood up for bylines during the internal debate. A few Times reporters, including Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Eric Lipton, have noted the change on their Twitter feeds. Given that the Times is not a low-ego joint, I’m sure additional critics of the new homepage exist inside the paper. If they’re not too busy appearing on cable news or on whatever TV show the paper is co-producing this week, let’s hear from them.

The Times has never had more star reporters on staff than it has today. Given that their starlight helps direct our reading, it makes no sense to hide their names in flurries of white space.

Addendum: Shortly after this story was published, New York Times Executive Editor Dean Baquet and Managing Editor Joesph Kahn sent this note to the staff defending the byline-less home page.

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Thanks to the Fort Worth Sports Literacy Association for the idea for this piece. I previously wrote about the history of bylines at Reuters and have drawn on that research here. Send your favorite Times byline to [email protected]. My email alerts demand a byline credit after contributing a sliver of reporting to a colleague. My Twitter feed can’t write and can barely edit. My RSS feed is on byline strike.