Most journalists, a vain lot at the best of times with present company no exception, covet their first byline. While I don’t remember my first at BBC News, I can still feel the kick of seeing one of my pieces trending. Take this 2006 feature marking a quarter of a century since Israel bombed Iraq’s nuclear reactor: “Osirak: Over the reactor“. After weeks of hard work on the features desk to pin down interviews and get permissions for things like video, I was chuffed to see the published piece, which had been my own idea, breaking ground for the site in terms of page views for a feature (something a rather sniffy editor remarked to me at the time). Even better was to see it translated and used by the BBC’s language services. Scanning the Arabic version, and aware of all the sensitivities involved, I felt real pride in working for a news group with such high standards of impartiality. Fast-foward 20 years and there are very few BBC pieces out there with my byline while those that do go out are generally the work of minutes or hours at most, not weeks. So what happened? Two things really.
The first and more predictable of them is that my role has changed with the needs of the job. Most shifts I put in now are editorial. On night shifts, which I am happy to do for the extra payments we get, I look after part of the digital news operation, which means selecting, commisioning, editing and publishing stories and videos in real time; curating the front page; managing reader feedback; and handing it all over to the incoming team. I don’t write anything myself because for most of the time it’s not my job anymore.
The other thing is that when I do write – and writing shifts make up part of my daytime rota – they are almost always general news stories. These are usually written up off multi-sourced news agency copy and are the same kind of stories BBC digital news – or “news online” as we were known in the old days – has been turning out since the year dot. Twenty years ago, nobody would have a byline on such stories. Bylines were the preserve of original journalism or analytical expertise. That said, writing such stories well is a real craft. In this respect, I always bow to BBC World Service, past masters at getting key news points into a few lines in their radio scripts. Today, however, all digital news stories are bylined by default. I wrote one today about a plague scare in Russia. Want it in Spanish? Here you go. One reason we were given for this change, brought in a few years ago, was the promotion of transparency on the site. I guess that will matter even more as artifical intelligence generates more and more news content. If you see a story bylined “John Smith” or “Patrick Jackson”, at least you will know it was written by a fellow carbon life form, who thought it through as they wrote.
