I have been wrestling with this article for a week.
Even after a lifetime of writing, that still happens to me.
What broke my writer’s block was a couple of hawks circling the sky outside my office window. In my home office, my writing desk is right in front of the only window in the room. It overlooks a small valley in the near distance, and the entire city of Colorado Springs in the far distance.
It’s a great place to stare out the window and daydream.
And that’s exactly what I was doing when this article finally shook loose: daydreaming. As I was staring out the window, two hawks started circling in the sky over the small valley.
Now, we get a lot of hawks here. Red tails, mostly, but the occasional ferruginous or Cooper’s hawk too. These two looked like our usual red tail hawk neighbors, and they were gliding on the updraft from the valley below. They flew in a spiral, perfectly distanced from one another, moving as one unit on the air currents.
This was just the analogy my brain had been looking for that unlocked my writing.
As the hawks moved together, I realized that this is the same dance a good ghostwriter does with a client. And that’s what I’d been trying to write about: the trustworthiness of bylines.
Trust and intention in lock step
I’ve been thinking a lot about bylines lately as trust in the written word has fallen further and further.
A “byline” is the named author of an article or other piece of writing. So if you look at the top of this Substack article, you’ll see “Jessica Mehring” as the byline, because I am the author of this piece of writing.
For the last 12 years, my firm has been ghostwriting marketing content for clients primarily in the technology space. Ghostwriting simply means writing on behalf of another person or organization. So the marketing team would hire us to write an article, and they would put the CEO’s name on it — the CEO would have the byline. Or they would hire us to write a white paper, and they would put the company’s name on it — the company would have the byline.
It was a good gig for a long time. Having good written content is nonnegotiable in marketing, and few people can write it well, or even want to write it. My team and I are really good at it, and we enjoy writing it.
Of course, things changed, as they do. Tech companies stopped communicating with their human audiences and started writing (and producing other kinds of content) for algorithms.
The focus on human-centered content declined even further at the time generative AI came along a few years ago. Not long after ChatGPT was launched post-pandemic, the tech sector collapsed. Mass layoffs began and venture capital dried up. Tech companies were looking for fast cost-cutting measures, so marketing budgets were slashed or eliminated entirely. And the marketers who remained often had to use AI to generate the content for their campaigns because they no longer had budget for human writers.
Back to bylines.
Before all this went down, for the most part, if the content was written by one human (ghostwriter), but had the byline of another human (author), it didn’t matter who actually wrote the piece. As long as the writing reflected the voice, expertise and values of the author named in the byline. And when the ghostwriter and client worked well in tandem — like those hawks circling outside my office — that’s exactly what happened. You couldn’t tell that the CEO didn’t write the article.
The author could feel proud to put their name on the content, even if they hadn’t written it, because it accurately reflected them.
But along with the shift to writing for algorithms came a change in attitude about bylines.
Bylines stopped meaning much to the people publishing the writing. Slap the CEO’s name on something and call it a day — as long as the algorithm is happy.
But this bait-and-switch is exactly why no one trusts content coming from companies anymore.
The trustworthiness of the byline actually does matter to human readers.
If I put one of my Horizon Peak team members’ names on this article, you wouldn’t believe it for a second. You, the reader, can tell it’s me. Beyond word choice and tone and style, it has my fingerprints all over it. The byline and the content are perfectly in sync.
On the other hand, I have a team member who is an amazing ghostwriter. She can mimic my writing really well. If she wrote this and I put my name in the byline, you might not be able to tell I didn’t write it. Because she and I work in sync, so the byline and the content would be in sync too. (Don’t worry, I’m not trying to trick you. I don’t use a ghostwriter for anything here on Trust Fall!)
When the content and the byline are not in sync — when the writing feels out of step with who authored it — what results is a loss of integrity.
And because integrity is one of the three elements of trust, once you lose it, trust is gone.
Readers are not widgets
I’m going to land this article the same way those hawks landed on the top of the ponderosa pine: swiftly but gently.
There seems to be a disconnect between what readers need (to trust what they’re reading) and what most companies publish (content for robots). Aligning the content with the byline — whether by using a qualified ghostwriter or having the author actually author the writing — seems like such a small thing to do to gain trust from an audience … but for companies, it costs something.
I don’t have a solution to this trust problem. I wish I did. I know why those marketing budgets got slashed, and marketers had nothing to do with it. Decisions are being made higher up the food chain. So my “call to action,” if you want to call it that, is simply to be aware that this problem exists. When you read an article that feels “off,” know that it could be a lack of integrity you’re sensing. When you write something that feels clunky and unpolished, know that it doesn’t need to be perfect to feel good and trustworthy to your readers. And if you’re in a position to publish something for a company, know that the byline does matter to the people you’re trying to reach.
Maybe I can’t convince those higher-ups that trust matters to their bottom line. But maybe making people aware of what’s happened will be the flap of a butterfly’s wing that causes a hurricane of integrity in what we read online.