The Unsigned Newsroom

The byline entered American journalism as a punishment, and it arrived in the mud. On January 26, 1863, Major General Joseph Hooker took command of the Army of the Potomac, a force that had bled itself white at Fredericksburg six weeks earlier and was deserting into the Virginia winter by the hundreds. The press corps trailing the army was in worse moral shape than the army. Correspondents wrote from hotel bars and Washington parlors, inflated skirmishes into battles, buried defeats, manufactured quotes, and signed none of it. Hooker’s predecessor had already begged the War Department for relief. “As it is impossible for me to ascertain with certainty who these anonymous writers are,” George McClellan wrote to Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, “I beg to suggest that another order be published holding the editors responsible.”

Weeks into the new command, a newspaper printed the size and location of the army. Hooker complained, and this time Stanton answered with backing: the War Department would support any measure he took against the press. That same day, the general issued General Order No. 48. From then on, every reporter with the Army of the Potomac would “publish their communications over their own signatures.” Ford Risley, the Penn State historian and author of Civil War Journalism, marks the order as the birth of the American byline. The order reads like what it was: a warrant. Hooker wanted a throat attached to every dispatch, so that when a correspondent lied, the liar could be found by name and shamed out of camp.

The correspondents hated it. A New York Herald man complained that it was “discouraging” to have his name “paraded before the public” as the author of letters “written on horseback or in woods, and often with the shells screaming to us to ‘hurry up!'” Others saw the edge sharpening. One of them predicted that signing their work would make correspondents “exert extraordinary means to achieve success,” and that is what happened. A name turned accuracy into property. Hooker, to his credit, matched the demand with a grant. “After any fight the reporters can open their fire as loudly as they please,” he wrote, and they would have “license to abuse or criticize me to their heart’s content,” so long as they gave the enemy nothing. He kept the army’s secrets off the page and put the writers’ names on it.

Two clarifications, because this essay is about custody and should practice it. Names had appeared over American newspaper stories as early as the 1830s, as Risley himself concedes. What Hooker added was enforcement: a system, and an army behind it. And the general’s own name is Exhibit A in how names get stolen. Legend ties the slang word hooker to his camp followers. Colonel Charles Francis Adams Jr. did call the headquarters “a combination of barroom and brothel,” and a red light district in wartime Washington did get called Hooker’s Division. The record refuses the legend anyway. The word appears in print in its prostitute sense in 1835, in the New York Transcript, and again in an 1845 North Carolina letter, long before anyone feared or flattered the general. He amplified a word he did not coin. Even his surname had a chain of custody, and the chain, inspected, points away from him.

Once forced, the signature became wages. Michael Schudson dates the byline’s ascendancy at The New York Times to the 1920s and 1930s. As late as 1925, only about five percent of that paper’s articles carried a personal byline, and at the Kansas City Star a young Ernest Hemingway could not get his name into print at all. By 2000 the Times bylined roughly seventy percent of its articles. The name over the story became the reporter’s property, promotion, and insurance. The Economist sneers at the result as rampant byline inflation, picture bylines on ordinary news stories, and the sneer is earned as far as it goes. A name can become a brand. A brand can still be shamed, and the inflation does not erase that.

There is an honest way to withhold a name, and it has been operating in London since 1843. The Economist prints nearly everything anonymously, and the policy is declared, uniform, and owned. James Wilson, who founded the paper, wrote the first issues almost entirely himself in the first person plural, and the plural has since become fact: leaders are argued out in weekly meetings open to the whole editorial staff, correspondents cooperate, editors rewrite. “The main reason for anonymity,” the paper explains, “is a belief that what is written is more important than who writes it.” Geoffrey Crowther, the editor from 1938 to 1956, held that anonymity keeps the editor “not the master but the servant of something far greater than himself.” Special reports carry their author’s name in the rubric. Retiring editors sign their farewells. The masthead names the editor, who answers for every unsigned sentence, and the letters page answers back. The critic Jack Shafer once quipped that the paper draws half its authority from the byline ban, since readers imagine the copy handed down from Olympus, and the quip misses only the cost of the bargain: the institution must absorb every blow its writers would otherwise take one by one. A reader knows the rule before reading a line. That is anonymity as policy: the institution signs, publicly, in place of the person.

London’s other anonymity held out longer and ended on schedule. The Times did not byline even its principal correspondents until January 23, 1967. The Times Literary Supplement kept its reviewers nameless until June 7, 1974, when the editor John Gross announced the change in a signed editorial. Gross gave the reason in terms Hooker would have recognized: reviewers “ought to take responsibility for their opinions.” He considered the old arrangement a cloak for assassins; in signed reviews, he held, the hand that held the dagger would be known. There is the whole ethics of the byline in one image. A blade with no hand on it is weather.

The signature proves its worth when it is abused, because abuse is what it was built to catch. On April 18, 2003, Macarena Hernandez of the San Antonio Express-News published “Valley Mom Awaits News of MIA Son,” about the mother of a soldier missing in Iraq. Eight days later, Jayson Blair of The New York Times published a story so similar that Hernandez recognized her own reporting in it. Her editor called his editors. Blair resigned on May 1, and on Sunday, May 11, 2003, the Times gave its front page to an accounting headlined “Times Reporter Who Resigned Leaves Long Trail of Deception.” The paper’s own investigators found problems in at least 36 of the 73 articles Blair had written since October 2002, and they found them by pulling the thread his name made: telephone records, expense documents, sources who had never met him. The paper then did the custodial work in the open, inviting readers to report further defects and attaching cautionary notices to the poisoned articles in the databases, so the record itself would carry the warning forward. I read that accounting the Sunday it ran, and what stayed with me was the mechanism, a newspaper performing surgery on itself in public because every fabrication carried one signature. Executive editor Howell Raines and managing editor Gerald Boyd were gone within weeks. The noose worked because the neck was real.

Set that mechanism against the present and watch it dissolve. In October 2025, the Medill Local News Initiative at Northwestern counted what is left of the American newspaper: 7,325 papers in 2005, about 4,490 now, with 136 more closed in the year it measured. Two hundred thirteen counties have no local news source at all, and some 50 million Americans live in counties with one source or none. For the first time, fewer than a thousand dailies remain, and newspaper employment has fallen by about three quarters since 2005. Closures that year hit hardest among small, independent owners, the ones who lived in the towns they covered, and Medill’s Tim Franklin named what dies with them: “These small, independent owners are the ones that were trusted.” Into the emptied counties flows the wire homogenate: the same copy, shepherded by 54 national networks running 849 local-looking sites, the same paragraph under a hundred town flags, signed “From Staff and Wire Reports” or signed with nothing at all. The name thins into Staff, and Staff is nobody.

The machines arrived in two costumes, and the costumes matter more than the machines. On June 30, 2014, the Associated Press announced it would generate corporate earnings stories with software from Automated Insights. When the copy began appearing that July, each piece carried a signed confession at the bottom: “This story was generated automatically by Automated Insights using data from Zacks Investment Research.” The machine was named as a machine, in the open, every time. CNET chose the other costume. Beginning in November 2022, the site published 77 personal finance explainers under the byline “CNET Money Staff,” and the only notice that an engine had drafted them sat behind a hover over the byline. Futurism exposed the arrangement in January 2023, and the arithmetic was wrong in ways no living finance writer would be wrong: one piece told readers that a $10,000 deposit at three percent interest would earn $10,300 in a year. Editor in chief Connie Guglielmo eventually confirmed corrections on 41 of the 77 stories. The instrument of concealment was a department. “Staff” is the thinnest mask available, a name with no one underneath it, and CNET reached for it first.

Then came the case that named this essay. On November 27, 2023, Maggie Harrison Dupré at Futurism published an investigation built on a plain question: who wrote the product reviews on Sports Illustrated’s website? The answer was nobody. The reviews were bylined to “Drew Ortiz,” whose bio said he had “spent much of his life outdoors,” and whose headshot was for sale on an artificial intelligence portrait marketplace under the label “neutral white young-adult male.” Ortiz warned readers that volleyball “can be a little tricky to get into, especially without an actual ball to practice with.” When Ortiz vanished in the summer of 2023, his articles were reattributed, with no editor’s note, to “Sora Tanaka,” a “fitness guru” whose headshot was for sale on the same marketplace. Asked for an explanation, Sports Illustrated deleted everything. The only disclosure the articles ever received, added late, admitted the content was “created by a 3rd party” and that the magazine’s editorial staff was “not involved in the creation of this content,” a caption absolving the newsroom while the brand kept the money. The Arena Group, which then published the magazine, blamed a contractor called AdVon Commerce and called the fabricated identities “pen names,” though Futurism’s continued reporting found AdVon’s fabricated authors at dozens of other publications. “Horrified,” the Sports Illustrated union said, and it demanded “answers and transparency” from Arena Group management. In December, Arena fired chief executive Ross Levinsohn and three other executives, every one of them real, because the only punishable neck is a real one. Hooker demanded that liars sign their work so they could be found. The content shop inverted the order. Manufacture the liar, and no one is ever found. You cannot shame the never-born.

Rot ran below the articles, into the nameplate. Time Inc. had built Sports Illustrated from 1954 into a magazine that published William Faulkner and John Updike and stacked up National Magazine Awards. Meredith bought Time Inc. in 2018 and within a year sold the SI brand for $110 million to Authentic Brands Group, a licensing house that also manages the names of Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, and Muhammad Ali. Authentic licensed the publishing to a company called TheMaven, which renamed itself The Arena Group and then missed a $3.75 million licensing payment at the end of 2023. Authentic revoked the license in January 2024, and by March the rights had passed to Minute Media under a ten-year lease. The magazine that invented its reporters was itself a rented signature. From the brand on the cover to the name on the story, the chain of custody had no solid link in it anywhere.

The pattern did not end with the scandal, because the pattern was never the scandal. Gannett paused its machine-written sports recaps in August 2023 after one described a football game as “a close encounter of the athletic kind,” and that autumn, staff at Gannett’s Reviewed site warned that product reviews were appearing under authors no one could verify, an accusation the company denied. The Arena Group had already published error-riddled machine articles at Men’s Journal in February of that year, months before the volleyball ghost was caught. In May of this year, Sports Illustrated, by then under Minute Media, published a piece about bettors on the prediction market Kalshi that mirrored, point for point, a Sportico investigation by Dan Bernstein and Lev Akabas. The SI version ran under the name “Parker Loverich.” Asked about it, SI deleted the article, and then Loverich’s profile page, his LinkedIn, and his X account all went dark. The magazine assured the press that “Parker Loverich is a real reporter.” A real reporter with a deleted life, employed the way a stagehand employs a coat rack. And in August 2026, The Arena Group announced it was renaming itself Paradium.AI, a “publicly traded AI company,” and buying a firm to help it “scale data-driven content generation.” After years of hiding the machine behind borrowed faces, the company signed its work at last. There is a bleak honesty in that signature.

A hostile reader will ask whether I mean anonymous sources. I do not. A source unnamed in print is named to the editor; custody exists offstage, and an editor who burns a source pays for it. The unsigned article has custody nowhere. No editor stands in for “Staff Reports.” No one answers a letter addressed to “CNET Money.” The complaint lands in a queue, and the queue answers with a form.

For years on this site I have chased quotations down their chains of custody: who said the words, who wrote them down, who carried the text into print. The byline is the same discipline, one link earlier, and the byline is where the chain now breaks. A claim is worth the shame capacity of whatever stands behind it. A person can be shamed, fired, sued, corrected. An institution can be shamed, though only when it signs as an institution, in the open, the way The Economist signs, with a named editor and a letters page. There is no shaming a category. “Staff Reports” has no throat. The reader’s test is therefore short. Is there a name? If there is no name, is the anonymity declared policy with a named owner? Can the custodian still be found after publication, or does the profile page redirect to somebody new? An unsigned check does not pay. An unsigned contract does not bind. A dispatch without a name asks to be believed for free, and belief given for free is spent the same way.

Hooker did not keep his army. Beaten at Chancellorsville in May 1863, relieved on June 28, three days before Gettysburg began without him, he left behind one order that outlasted every general who outlasted him. It asked for a small thing, a name in ink under the words, and it remains the whole asking price of trust. Somewhere in the Virginia mud that winter, a correspondent dipped his pen, cursed General Order No. 48, and signed his work while the shells screamed at him to hurry up. The words are yours, the signature said, and so is the blame. Sign your dispatch.