[Ipg-smz] Poll: Are Bylines necessary?

[Richard Santalesa]

Two words: Federalist Papers

-----Original Message-----
From: Ipg-smz [mailto:ipg-smz-bounces at netpress.org] On Behalf Of John
Coggeshall
Sent: Thursday, December 06, 2018 2:55 PM
To: ipg-smz at netpress.org
Subject: [Ipg-smz] Poll: Are Bylines necessary?

Hey all,

So I wanted to ask the opinion of some people totally outside of the 
particular realm I'm talking about, who still would be pretty much 
authorities on the subject.

Recently I got involved in a hyper-local media site called 12 Mile 
(http://12mile.com). It's a community run site, we accept contributors 
from anyone who wants to write save they meet the editorial guidelines 
(publicly posted). But one sort of unique thing is by default, we don't 
publish the author of the pieces unless they want us to.

I don't know if any of you have ever been involved in local politics 
before, but it's nasty. During the recent elections it was just a 
mud-slinging contest and torn the whole community apart. 12 Mile was 
born out of the idea that content and people aren't the same thing, and 
ideas should be measured on their cited references and not on who wrote 
them.

Unsurprisingly, this has caused a number of vocal outbursts within the 
community -- mostly it seems from people who appear to be against 
institutions where the facts aren't painting them to be the monsters 
their opponents would like them to be and in general have been the worst 
offenders when it comes to the mud-slinging. So far we've held the line 
firm that we don't disclose authors or "owners" but I wanted to hear 
some perspectives of people without a horse in the race. I don't think 
cries for "We can't trust this piece if we don't know who wrote it" to 
be legitimate myself, thoughts?

References:

Editorial Guidelines: https://12mile.com/editorial-guidelines/

12 Mile Philosophy: https://12mile.com/the-philosophy-of-12-mile/

What say you? Is this a legitimate approach or not?

Cheers,

John



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