As you may or may not know, I have been a writer for well over two decades. During that time I have written thousands of articles. A large portion of them no longer have my name as a byline. No, they weren’t ghostwritten. Losing your byline is a common problem in the content writing world, and I’ll tell you why.

Contracts and loopholes

When you create work for a website, unless you have a contract that states you retain rights, in the US the work is considered “work made for hire.” In this case, your client, the online magazine or site, gets the copyright for your work one it is paid for in full.

According to the US Copyright Office:

For legal purposes, when a work is a “work made for hire,” the author is not the individual who actually created the work. Instead, the party that hired the individual is considered both the author and the copyright owner of the work.

Whether a work is a work made for hire is determined by facts in existence at the time the work is created. There are two situations in which a work made for hire is produced:

(1) when the work is created by an employee as part of the employee’s regular duties and (2) when a certain type of work is created as a result of an express written agreement between the creator and a party specially ordering or commissioning the work. When a work is produced under these conditions, the employer or the party ordering or commissioning the work is considered the author and copyright owner.

You can read more about writing contracts here.

What does this have to do with your byline? Very simply, once you have written the article and the site has paid for it, they can put whatever name they want as the byline because they own the article.

Why sites change bylines

Now, most sites don’t change the bylines to be sneaky and take credit for work that you did (though some do!). Most of the time, over the months or years after the article is live, publications will bring in other writers to update the article. The publication will then put that writer’s name as the byline. I’ve had this happen to my articles more times than I can count.

How to save your bylines

By this point, you’re probably a little disturbed. How are you supposed to build clips for your portfolio if a publication changes your byline? Years ago I would have suggested making sure that you retain rights to your articles, but most large sites and companies these days require that all contracts be work made for hire contracts. When it’s company policy, most editors don’t have the ability to change the contract for writers. So, what’s another option?

As soon as the article is published, take a full-page screenshot, including your byline and the site name or logo. Then, add the screenshot to your website.

To take a full-page screen shot that includes your entire article, there are several options. If you have Chrome as your browser you can use the GoFullPage extension. You can also use software like Snagit or a website like Web-capture.net. No matter what option you choose, be sure to save your clips so you can use them later.