Credit where it’s due

“Saying people’s names isn’t difficult, but it does disrupt the assumption that brilliant journalistic work is the product of singular, virtuosic talents rather than collaboration.”

In 1970, a group of female researchers at Newsweek sued the magazine for gender discrimination. Researchers were central to the journalism process at the time. They took reporters’ copy down by phone, cleaned it up, and fact-checked and filled in facts. But it wasn’t their names that showed up at the tops of articles; it was the male reporters’. And women were never promoted to staff writer roles.

Today’s journalism is no less a team effort, and we still have a crediting problem. While reporters now type up their own copy — some even load it into content management systems! — they still collaborate with editors who shape their stories. Their work is tightened and protected by copy editors and fact checkers, and audience editors write headlines and social copy and develop strategies to reach the people who need the reporting most.

So why do so many organizations still only credit reporters on stories?

A lot of journalism work is hard to byline — at least that’s what we’ve been told. How does one give credit to the photo editor who didn’t take the photo, but selected the perfect image to accompany a story? What about the social media editor who was able to distill a complicated article into a perfect headline and subhed combination? Or the data journalist who backread a reporter’s copy to make sure their conclusions were correct?

A lot of this work isn’t credited, and that makes it difficult to make a case for job opportunities, especially internal promotions. Digital folks are told over and over again that they don’t have the skills to advance in their newsrooms because they didn’t come up in the “traditional” way; the truth is often that those in positions to hire and promote often don’t have full visibility or understanding of what these workers are actually doing and how they contribute to the success of newsrooms.

Audio, in particular, has been terrible about giving credit to the producers and editors who work behind the scenes on podcasts and radio broadcasts. Not crediting production perpetuates the myth that podcasting is the product of singularly charismatic hosts, which is naive at best and destructive at worst. Workers’ labor is erased and undervalued, and compensation and working conditions follow. Budgets bloat to pay “talent” that wouldn’t know the difference between a mono and a stereo file, while producers burn out and leave the industry.

Credit isn’t an ego boost. It’s a direct reflection of the perceived value that someone brings to an organization. Who gets credit directly relates to who is paid more, who receives more opportunities, and what the industry as a whole looks like.

National Public Radio only revised its byline policy last month to standardize giving credit to producers, researchers, and editors in addition to on-air voices. This was the result of negotiations with NPR’s SAG-AFTRA unit, and it means that producers’ names will be said out loud at the end of podcasts and broadcasts, a bare minimum of credit being given to the people who created the works:

Many publications have started including more comprehensive credit lists on enterprise projects but that credit doesn’t often extend to smaller scale coverage. I’d like to see more comprehensive crediting on all types of stories built into publishing processes. I’m hoping more publications follow The Markup’s example: Each article includes a credits section highlighting the names of everyone who touched the pieces:

Saying people’s names isn’t difficult, but it does disrupt the assumption that brilliant journalistic work is the product of singular, virtuosic talents rather than collaboration.

Alex Sujong Laughlin is a freelance writer and podcast producer based in New Haven.

In 1970, a group of female researchers at Newsweek sued the magazine for gender discrimination. Researchers were central to the journalism process at the time. They took reporters’ copy down by phone, cleaned it up, and fact-checked and filled in facts. But it wasn’t their names that showed up at the tops of articles; it was the male reporters’. And women were never promoted to staff writer roles.

Today’s journalism is no less a team effort, and we still have a crediting problem. While reporters now type up their own copy — some even load it into content management systems! — they still collaborate with editors who shape their stories. Their work is tightened and protected by copy editors and fact checkers, and audience editors write headlines and social copy and develop strategies to reach the people who need the reporting most.

So why do so many organizations still only credit reporters on stories?

A lot of journalism work is hard to byline — at least that’s what we’ve been told. How does one give credit to the photo editor who didn’t take the photo, but selected the perfect image to accompany a story? What about the social media editor who was able to distill a complicated article into a perfect headline and subhed combination? Or the data journalist who backread a reporter’s copy to make sure their conclusions were correct?

A lot of this work isn’t credited, and that makes it difficult to make a case for job opportunities, especially internal promotions. Digital folks are told over and over again that they don’t have the skills to advance in their newsrooms because they didn’t come up in the “traditional” way; the truth is often that those in positions to hire and promote often don’t have full visibility or understanding of what these workers are actually doing and how they contribute to the success of newsrooms.

Audio, in particular, has been terrible about giving credit to the producers and editors who work behind the scenes on podcasts and radio broadcasts. Not crediting production perpetuates the myth that podcasting is the product of singularly charismatic hosts, which is naive at best and destructive at worst. Workers’ labor is erased and undervalued, and compensation and working conditions follow. Budgets bloat to pay “talent” that wouldn’t know the difference between a mono and a stereo file, while producers burn out and leave the industry.

Credit isn’t an ego boost. It’s a direct reflection of the perceived value that someone brings to an organization. Who gets credit directly relates to who is paid more, who receives more opportunities, and what the industry as a whole looks like.

National Public Radio only revised its byline policy last month to standardize giving credit to producers, researchers, and editors in addition to on-air voices. This was the result of negotiations with NPR’s SAG-AFTRA unit, and it means that producers’ names will be said out loud at the end of podcasts and broadcasts, a bare minimum of credit being given to the people who created the works:

Many publications have started including more comprehensive credit lists on enterprise projects but that credit doesn’t often extend to smaller scale coverage. I’d like to see more comprehensive crediting on all types of stories built into publishing processes. I’m hoping more publications follow The Markup’s example: Each article includes a credits section highlighting the names of everyone who touched the pieces:

Saying people’s names isn’t difficult, but it does disrupt the assumption that brilliant journalistic work is the product of singular, virtuosic talents rather than collaboration.

Alex Sujong Laughlin is a freelance writer and podcast producer based in New Haven.

Alan Henry   A reckoning with why trust in news is so low

Jessica Maddox   Journalists keep getting manipulated by internet culture

Andrew Losowsky   Journalism realizes the replacement for Twitter is not a new Twitter

Taylor Lorenz   The “creator economy” will be astroturfed

Bill Adair   The year of the fact-check (no, really!)

Elizabeth Bramson-Boudreau   More of the same

Jessica Clark   Open discourse retrenches

Laura E. Davis   The year we embrace the robots — and ourselves

Snigdha Sur   Newsrooms get nimble in a recession

Brian Moritz   Rebuilding the news bundle

Michael W. Wagner   The backlash against pro-democracy reporting is coming

Jim Friedlich   Local journalism steps up to the challenge of civic coverage

Kathy Lu   We need emotionally agile newsroom leaders

Jesse Holcomb   Buffeted, whipped, bullied, pulled

Sue Cross   Thinking and acting collectively to save the news

Leezel Tanglao   Community partnerships drive better reporting

David Cohn   AI made this prediction

Cassandra Etienne   Local news fellowships will help fight newsroom inequities

Cindy Royal   Yes, journalists should learn to code, but…

Tre'vell Anderson   Continued culpability in anti-trans campaigns

Anika Anand   Independent news businesses lead the way on healthy work cultures

Joanne McNeil   Facebook and the media kiss and make up

Johannes Klingebiel   The innovation team, R.I.P.

David Skok   Renewed interest in human-powered reporting

Anita Varma   Journalism prioritizes the basic need for survival

Eric Holthaus   As social media fragments, marginalized voices gain more power

Kaitlin C. Miller   Harassment in journalism won’t get better, but we’ll talk about it more openly

Jody Brannon   We’ll embrace policy remedies

Jonas Kaiser   Rejecting the “free speech” frame

Dominic-Madori Davis   Everyone finally realizes the need for diverse voices in tech reporting

Molly de Aguiar and Mandy Van Deven   Narrative change trend brings new money to journalism

Christoph Mergerson   The rot at the core of the news business

Dannagal G. Young   Stop rewarding elite performances of identity threat

Kerri Hoffman   Podcasting goes local

Mauricio Cabrera   It’s no longer about audiences, it’s about communities

Shanté Cosme   The answer to “quiet quitting” is radical empathy

Barbara Raab   More journalism funders will take more risks

Mariana Moura Santos   A woman who speaks is a woman who changes the world

Mael Vallejo   More threats to press freedom across the Americas

Ståle Grut   Your newsroom experiences a Midjourney-gate, too

Mar Cabra   The inevitable mental health revolution

Jacob L. Nelson   Despite it all, people will still want to be journalists

Mario García   More newsrooms go mobile-first

Francesco Zaffarano   There is no end of “social media”

John Davidow   A year of intergenerational learning

Moreno Cruz Osório   Brazilian journalism turns wounds into action

An Xiao Mina   Journalism in a time of permacrisis

Sarabeth Berman   Nonprofit local news shows that it can scale

Esther Kezia Thorpe   Subscription pressures force product innovation

S. Mitra Kalita   “Everything sucks. Good luck to you.”

Janet Haven   ChatGPT and the future of trust 

Mary Walter-Brown and Tristan Loper   Mission-driven metrics become our North Star

Khushbu Shah   Global reporting will suffer

Amethyst J. Davis   The slight of the great contraction

Gina Chua   The traditional story structure gets deconstructed

Bill Grueskin   Local news will come to rely on AI

Eric Nuzum   A focus on people instead of power

Emma Carew Grovum   The year to resist forgetting about diversity

Upasna Gautam   Technology that performs at the speed of news

Brian Stelter   Finding new ways to reach news avoiders

Christina Shih   Shared values move from nice-to-haves to essentials

Andrew Donohue   We’ll find out whether journalism can, indeed, save democracy

Karina Montoya   More reporters on the antitrust beat

Alex Perry   New paths to transparency without Twitter

Elite Truong   In platform collapse, an opportunity for community

Danielle K. Brown and Kathleen Searles   DEI efforts must consider mental health and online abuse

Errin Haines   Journalists on the campaign trail mend trust with the public

Kavya Sukumar   Belling the cat: The rise of independent fact-checking at scale

Emily Nonko   Incarcerated reporters get more bylines

Kaitlyn Wells   We’ll prioritize media literacy for children

Cory Bergman   The AI content flood

Zizi Papacharissi   Platforms are over

Matt Rasnic   More newsroom workers turn to organized labor

Sam Gregory   Synthetic media forces us to understand how media gets made

Ryan Nave   Citizen journalism, but make it equitable

Alexandra Svokos   Working harder to reach audiences where they are

Valérie Bélair-Gagnon   Well-being will become a core tenet of journalism

Josh Schwartz   The AI spammers are coming

Jaden Amos   TikTok personality journalists continue to rise

Anthony Nadler   Confronting media gerrymandering

Rachel Glickhouse   Humanizing newsrooms will be a badge of honor

Alex Sujong Laughlin   Credit where it’s due

Jim VandeHei   There is no “peak newsletter”

Jakob Moll   Journalism startups will think beyond English

Cari Nazeer and Emily Goligoski   News organizations step up their support for caregivers

Nicholas Thompson   The year AI actually changes the media business

Joe Amditis   AI throws a lifeline to local publishers

Richard Tofel   The press might get better at vetting presidential candidates

Nicholas Diakopoulos   Journalists productively harness generative AI tools

Don Day   The news about the news is bad. I’m optimistic.

Anna Nirmala   News organizations get new structures

Sarah Marshall   A web channel strategy won’t be enough

Basile Simon   Towards supporting criminal accountability

Larry Ryckman   We’ll work together with our competitors

A.J. Bauer   Covering the right wrong

Megan Lucero and Shirish Kulkarni   The future of journalism is not you

Eric Thurm   Journalists think of themselves as workers

Sue Schardt   Toward a new poetics of journalism

Susan Chira   Equipping local journalism

Al Lucca   Digital news design gets interesting again

Sumi Aggarwal   Smart newsrooms will prioritize board development

Hillary Frey   Death to the labor-intensive memo for prospective hires

Sarah Stonbely   Growth in public funding for news and information at the state and local levels

Juleyka Lantigua   Newsrooms recognize women of color as the canaries in the coal mine

Julia Angwin   Democracies will get serious about saving journalism

Ayala Panievsky   It’s time for PR for journalism

Priyanjana Bengani   Partisan local news networks will collaborate

Stefanie Murray   The year U.S. media stops screwing around and becomes pro-democracy

Jarrad Henderson   Video editing will help people understand the media they consume

Eric Ulken   Generative AI brings wrongness at scale

Ryan Kellett   Airline-like loyalty programs try to tie down news readers

Julia Beizer   News fatigue shows us a clear path forward

Daniel Trielli   Trust in news will continue to fall. Just look at Brazil.

Victor Pickard   The year journalism and capitalism finally divorce

Simon Galperin   Philanthropy stops investing in corporate media

Masuma Ahuja   Journalism starts working for and with its communities

Nicholas Jackson   There will be launches — and we’ll keep doing the work

Ryan Gantz   “I’m sorry, but I’m a large language model”

Tamar Charney   Flux is the new stability

Laxmi Parthasarathy   Unlocking the silent demand for international journalism

Burt Herman   The year AI truly arrives — and with it the reckoning

Raney Aronson-Rath   Journalists will band together to fight intimidation

Sue Robinson   Engagement journalism will have to confront a tougher reality

Jenna Weiss-Berman   The economic downturn benefits the podcasting industry. (No, really!)

Jennifer Brandel   AI couldn’t care less. Journalists will care more. 

Delano Massey   The industry shakes its imposter syndrome

Joni Deutsch   Podcast collaboration — not competition — breeds excellence

Walter Frick   Journalists wake up to the power of prediction markets

Peter Sterne   AI enters the newsroom

Paul Cheung   More news organizations will realize they are in the business of impact, not eyeballs

Lisa Heyamoto   The independent news industry gets a roadmap to sustainability

Felicitas Carrique and Becca Aaronson   News product goes from trend to standard

Wilson Liévano   Diaspora journalism takes the next step

Joshua P. Darr   Local to live, wire to wither

Nikki Usher   This is the year of the RSS reader. (Really!)

Surya Mattu   Data journalists learn from photojournalists

Janelle Salanga   Journalists work from a place of harm reduction

Pia Frey   Publishers start polling their users at scale

Doris Truong   Workers demand to be paid what the job is worth

Michael Schudson   Journalism gets more and more difficult

Martina Efeyini   Talk to Gen Z. They’re the experts of Gen Z.

Dana Lacey   Tech will screw publishers over

Tim Carmody   Newsletter writers need a new ethics

Jennifer Choi and Jonathan Jackson   Funders finally bet on next-generation news entrepreneurs

Rodney Gibbs   Recalibrating how we work apart

Ben Werdmuller   The internet is up for grabs again

Parker Molloy   We’ll reach new heights of moral panic

Alexandra Borchardt   The year of the climate journalism strategy

Sam Guzik   AI will start fact-checking. We may not like the results.

Ariel Zirulnick   Journalism doubles down on user needs

Gordon Crovitz   The year advertisers stop funding misinformation

Kirstin McCudden   We’ll codify protection of journalism and newsgathering

Peter Bale   Rising costs force more digital innovation

Amy Schmitz Weiss   Journalism education faces a crossroads

Sarah Alvarez   Dream bigger or lose out

J. Siguru Wahutu   American journalism reckons with its colonialist tendencies

Gabe Schneider   Well-funded journalism leaders stop making disparate pay