Sunday, December 27, 2009

Curious use of bylines in Bay City Times

Bay City Times Staff produces 2009 Fashion Moments List, except the note at the bottom shows a Washington Post credit. And this one.

LA Times story published under Bay City Times staff byline as well.

This came to me from a reader. It's a curious use of byline credit. Normally, a story taken from a news sydicate would be at the top of the story, not at the end. And putting a Bay City Times staff byline on it implies it was compiled by that paper.

Maybe just a mistake, but curious just the same.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Call it a glitch within the system that BCT uses to post their stories. With the software, each story has to have a byline of some sort. There's a preset list of bylines already implemented in the system -- staff members' names, paper names, etc. You'll notice that Associated Press wire stories use an Associated Press byline. There isn't a byline in the system for wire stories from other sources, though. It's an issue BCT is likely aware of and I'd imagine to be taken care of when there's more staff in the building after the Christmas weekend. In the meantime, this can probably be chalked up to a need to fill Sunday lifestyle space on a day when every reporter in the country is covering a failed terrorist attack.

Jim of L-Town said...

I'll rush over to the Bay City news site and see what great folo was done on the failed terrorist attack in Detroit that occupied all the copy editors and reporters.

When I looked on the Flint Journal site there was not metion of the failed terrorist attack for nearly 24 hours and that was a wire story.

Jim of L-Town said...

OK, just went to the Bay City site and found a couple localized stories by a blogger named Jonathan Oosting, but I didn't find (doesn't mean it's not there) any other local stories by Bay City or other local reporters on the failed terrorist attack.

As I said in my original story, this was probably a mistake and not intentional, but I don't think the fact it happened can be blamed on a failed terrorist attack.

I'll accept the fact that all the papers are probably extremely short handed, though.

former newsie said...

Oosting is an mlive producer who mainly aggregates content from other sites.

Even the Detroit papers didn't seem to have many hands on deck to cover the failed terrorist attack story.

Anonymous said...

"Curious." That's a great word to use when describing The Bay City Times, although "odd" is a bit more economical.

Anonymous said...

here's a test, jim, that i recently had to take.

try and find a direct number to a reporter at a booth newspaper.

try and do a hot link to a reporter's email.

try and find a phone number on a story, or an email, to a reporter, on mlive.

i may be missing it, but i'm not seeing it.

so ... they feed mlive, but no one can reach them?

oh, you can find a generic number to the newsroom, and the titles of the honchos.

but ... at tfj, there used to be a phone and an email on every story of any substance.

in this day and age, readers expect to be able to reach reporters, er, content providers.

not so much at mlive, i reckon.

sigh.

Anonymous said...

I am a Journal refugee who works for a nonprofit in Flint.

In its Christmas Eve edition, The Journal managed to incorrectly list both the date and time for one of our events, which was to happen Dec. 27. The reference, in the Let's Go section, was fairly prominent.

Partly because I no longer read the Journal as ardently as I used to, I didn't notice the mistake until Saturday.

In hopes of having a correction printed in the Sunday paper, I called the FJ under the "Local news" number listed in my phone book, and I got the voicemail recording of an editor who left the FJ months ago. I never could reach someone to run a correction.

I should've been much more upset than what I was, but so few people read the Journal any more that it really didn't seem to matter. Indeed, I have not (and nor have any of my co-workers) received so much as one phone call concerning about the time/date snafu.