Mini-rant: Bylines

Literary Saloon published a rant about why bloggers should link to source material (reports, press releases, etc) instead of reporting of the same material by big media companies.

I have another rant. When linking to an article, why don’t bloggers identify the person who wrote it? With articles on New York Times, for example, articles are archived after a week or so, and it’s impossible for people to get access to it. On the other hand, if you know the writer’s name, it is sometimes possible to google the writer’s name and find some copy of the actual article, sometimes on the writer’s own website. A perfect example would be Virginia Postrel’s Dynamist Blog.