Anatomy of an Article

Recently I was talking to someone smart about a spicy article headline, and then realized they thought writers are the ones who pick the headlines for articles they write. This got me thinking about how many misperceptions there are about each section of an article, and I wanted to break it down for you.

The headline

It's normal to assume that the person who wrote a headline is the person whose name is beneath it. That's how personal blogs work! But for an article on a website or in a newspaper or magazine, it's much less common for the writer to pen their own headline.

Sometimes a writer provides one or more sample headlines that an editor or copyeditor chooses. My husband even wrote a headline for me once! But it's usually an editor or copyeditor that writes (or rewrites) it.

Sometimes there are multiple headlines, too. Major sites will often do A/B split testing, starting with two titles and eventually using the one that performs better.

So if you are about to yell at a writer about their clickbaity or misleading headline, just be aware that they probably didn't write it.

The byline

I started my writing career as a freelancer, and I used to think that the person whose name was below the headline was the person who wrote the story. Then, while working on a particularly unwieldy group project in grad school, I realized that a byline is a negotiation.

An editor might want to add someone's name to a story even if they didn't actually write anything. Or they might want to remove someone's name if that person annoyed them by pushing back on a key concept in the piece. It really can be as simple as that.

I've also seen people who did a lot of work not be included because their work was mostly background research. But I've also had my byline on stories where my work was entirely background research and interviews that informed the story and led to further research or different research directions, but didn't actually make it into the final piece.

And, of course, some people have ghostwriters so they have their name on things they didn't write at all.

The story

I've also had editors entirely rewrite stories or sections of stories. This can be amazing if the editor is a strong writer and I've been staring at the page for too long, but there's always the chance that errors will sneak their way in.

One time an editor edited an error into my work that I didn't catch, and then when the correction notice came out, the error was attributed to me. Even worse is when the error is not corrected at all, putting the writer in the odd position of not wanting to be held accountable for something they didn't write, but also not wanting to throw their editor under the bus.

When an editor entirely rewrites a story, sometimes they'll add their name to the byline, and sometimes they'd just leave the original writer's name.

There's also been a few instances when I asked to have my name removed because of errors or sensationalism I hadn't agreed to. But this is the nuclear option and that editor will probably hate you or at least never want to work with you again.

The quotes

You are really not supposed to edit direct quotes for sources, but I have seen it done, with people asking the source to sign off on it.

If a source is in-house sometimes people will just pen a quote for them and ask them if it sounds okay.

There are different policies on whether sources can review their quotes before publication, depending on the outlet, as well as whether you can use quotes sent via email vs. a phone call or video call or in person.

The bottom line

All of this is to say that while an article might look like a single, cohesive piece of work with one clear author (or multiple clear authors), in reality, it's the result of a lot of invisible collaboration, negotiation, compromise, and sometimes politics.

The further you get from a personal blog and into large-scale or traditional publishing, the less control any one person has over the final product. So when you have issues with a headline, a framing choice, or a quote, it's worth remembering that what you're seeing is rarely the work of just one person.