To the broader point: There’s no doubt that lots and lots of journalists are fueled by the idea of seeing their name in print, and by the small-scale prominence that comes from being a recognized reporter in a particular community. But I tend to think that, overall, writing online tends to *increase* the connection between writer and text over the status quo in the mainstream media. Most pieces produced for, say, American newspapers or magazines are identified less with the writer than with the publication. Readers identify articles as “that piece in the Times yesterday,” not “that Adam Nagourney piece yesterday.” (A few writers, like Malcolm Gladwell, have been able to brand their work successfully as their own, not their publications, but they’re the exception, I think.)

Plus, most pieces in mainstream publications have been massaged and edited by any number of journalists along the path to publication, no matter whose name is at the top of the story.

Online, I think the issue of authorship is usually easier — Josh Marshall’s work is identifiably Josh Marshall’s and is thought of as such. So is Jason Kottke’s, so is Cory Doctorow’s. Writers online, on average, develop much stronger personal brands and connections to their work than do those working in old media.

You do get into fuzzier corners when one brings in linking — in that a Kottke or a Boing Boing might get the public “credit” for finding and promoting a link to something produced by someone else. I guess I believe in the democracy of the link — that so long as one is pointing people to the original text/site, one’s done all right by everyone.

But those are just off-the-cuff thoughts. There’s room for interesting work on figuring out why, exactly, people write online for no financial compensation. Maybe the old concept of “egoboo” gets at some of it — I think you’re right that people produce content in part to get credit for it.

I would, though, comment on the theme of your post with a certain extra sense of perspective given to me by the experience of being the author of the post you linked to. I’m not being critical; I wouldn’t have done the guest post if I didn’t want to make my ideas available to exactly the kind of fair use you’ve given them, and I‘m very gratified by your doing so. Yet at the same time, there’s something a little unsettling about seeing my words on another blog without my name anywhere attached, and I‘m still trying to figure out for myself how I feel about that. I do use a pseudonym at my blog; I’m a grad student and a pseudonym frees you up from some of the worries someone without much professional security might otherwise have about speaking forcefully about whatever you feel like writing about it. But the flipside, I suddenly see, is that you give up a certain identification with what you’ve written. And while traditional journalism might have “fetishized its acts of discovery,” it’s also true that giving the writer a personal stake in the thing being written is pretty important if that writer is to be expected to do good work. If Stanley hadn’t been allowed to take credit for his “discoveries,” he probably wouldn’t have undergone all the trouble, and while that wouldn’t have been a big loss in his case (I’m more down on Stanley than was probably clear from that post) there are certainly counterexamples of self-interested journalists who do their best work in expectation of being able to take personal credit for it, and of “society,” in some nebulous sense, reaping the benefit.

In other words, I wonder if this wonderfully un-policed and un-regulated medium also has the potential to more easily sever the connection between writer and text, in a way that would have real consequences for journalism “in the internet age.” I ask that question in good faith; I’m really not complaining or criticizing — and I’m very much a partisan of internet scholarship in general — I’m just curious what your take on this sort of thing is, since it seems right up your alley. In the traditional media, one always knows who the official author of a thing is, but internet text tends to get much more loosely cited and the tangled webs of attribution are much more difficult to tease out (and I don’t think people bother). I wonder what the macro result of all that would be; it’s still a marketplace, but has something strange happened to the profit motive? At the very least, it’s a different kind of calculus for writers.