The ever-present "By Staff Reports," an affectation that has irritated me since it became popular at newspapers, may not be as bad as I thought.
"By Staff Reports," as I have noted numerous times, nearly always means it was a press release and the staff had little or nothing to do with it, especially since many times the release runs verbatim.
The Monett Times has taken this nonsense to a higher level. In today's edition, the Times ran a story concerning the grand jury indictments against Anderson Guest House owner Robert Dupont, his wife Laverne, their daughter Kelley Wheeler, and Joplin River of Life Ministries.
From reading the article, it is obvious it is a news release from the U. S. Attorney's office. The byline on the article, however, read "Special to the Monett Times."
Why do newspapers have such a hard time simply admitting they are running a news release and identifying it as such?
7 comments:
so what about sports reports that say from staff reports. those certainly aren't press releases. what is your take on that Mr. Turner?
I would say there is no need to put any kind of a byline on those reports. For the most part, they are usually stories which are called in to the newspaper, where a reporter or a clerk takes the information and then turns it into an article.
I have seen blogs that do the same thing
bylines help distinguish material placed by the editorial staff (even if it is barely news) from advertising. how would you note the difference without a byline?
Seems like you are the only one irritated by it. Could it be because it doesn't have your name on it?
Randy,
This comment didn't show up after I posted it two days ago, so I will assume it just got lost in cyberspace. You don't censor your readers' comments do you?
The reason papers don't use "news release" as the byline is because that doesn't make sense to a lot of people outside of the media and PR worlds. It is "inside baseball" Randy, and would be similar to ending printed articles with "-30-" or "###." TV news writers say "in a statement" rather than "in a news release," and most newspapers use "special to" or "from staff reports." They do that because many of their readers/listeners/viewers don't know what "news release" means. It's industry jargon, and most journalists ans editors are trained to eliminate industry jargon from news articles. What's so hard to understand about that?
I would imagine more people would understand "news release" than "by staff reports." More importantly, it would be accurate, a commodity that should be prized by newspapers.
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