The International Business Times reported that a new study has found that “the proliferation of bylines characterized the news as an imperfect, all too human account of reality, and opened the way for celebrity journalism.”
“The byline is a relatively new phenomenon in the history of journalism and that newspapers as respected as the New York Times went out of their way to avoid using bylines as a means of underplaying the importance of the individual reporters,” researcher Zvi Reich is quoted as saying.
According to the study, news organizations started giving almost everyone a byline because of “journalists’ pressure for public acclaim.”