The mysterious case of the Daily Telegraph's imaginary journalists

Posted by Christie Silk on July 9, 2009 at 9:43 AM

The Daily Telegraph has come under criticism for inventing bylines to give the impression that agency stories were written by the paper's own journalists. The accusations came from the satirical current affairs magazine, Private Eye, who claimed to have found seven fake byline names pertaining to be sports correspondents.

The claims were then investigated by the journalism ethics group, the Media Standards Trust, which described the articles as being very alike other stories attributed to agencies. The group used the website, Journalisted, which archives every article written by a national newspaper journalist, so that they can be compared for such purposes. The profiles of the imaginary journalists were linked to stories, which apparently bore a striking resemblance to ones without a byline or that were known to have been written by agency writers.

It is not an uncommon practice for papers to publish agency stories and accredit them to in-house journalists. The invention of fake names, however, is according to the Trust "a step on from this". The names, it has been suggested by a source at the Telegraph, were included primarily for design purposes.

The director of the group, Martin Moore, said "even if one accepts that, in an age of print, this was a common and recognised inside practice, does that make it justified?"

As the current cold economic climate forces newsrooms to adapt through the attrition of staff and resources, the increasing use of agency stories is unsurprising. The creation of fake journalists may in the eyes of some critics be a step towards the ridiculous, however, with regards to reporting standings, how different is this to the the attribution of stories to journalists who haven't written them?

Source: Press Gazette
Media Standards Trust