Consumer Reports to add bylines in magazine

Consumer Reports president Marta Tellado sent out the following announcement earlier this week:

Dear Colleagues,

I am excited to share with you a number of important changes and updates for our content and communications teams.

Let’s start with staff news:

Jennifer Shecter has been promoted to Director, Content Impact & Corporate Outreach. In her new role, Jen will be moving from our communications team into our content group, where she will be a key leader responsible for bridging CR’s editorial initiatives with its policy and engagement efforts—working closely with communications, business development, and our impact units—as we work toward our mission of creating a fairer, safer, and healthier world. She will continue to oversee manufacturer and stakeholder outreach for our testing and reporting to ensure we achieve maximum impact in the marketplace. Jen will report to Wendy Bounds.

In her nearly 17-year career with CR, Jen has proven herself to be an indispensable leader on many fronts of our highest impact work—from food and auto safety to a wide range of marketplace accountability and fairness issues. She has been instrumental in helping to direct enforcement of our no-commercial use policy and in educating companies about our business policies. Jen will continue that important work in her new role.

Jessica Tun, who has worked closely with Jen in communications, will also transfer to Wendy’s team and continue reporting to Jen.  The events team of Nicole Sarrubbo and Janice Smith will remain on the communications team, and will now report to Kelli Halyard.

To further our efforts to connect with consumers wherever they are, Eric Charping from our Austin office will be moving into communications as a Social Media Program Manager reporting to Kevin Winterfield.  Eric will lead the programming work of two of our most important social platforms, Facebook and Twitter, while developing CR’s strategy to maximize social performance on all channels.

Please join me in congratulating Jen and Eric.

Next, a historic change for the magazine:

Like many digital media organizations, we have long used bylines on CRO. And yet, with rare exceptions, the magazine has not carried bylines over its 80-year history. We’ve heard from many of our writers and editors that they’d like to see our byline policy be consistent across print and digital—and so we’re aiming to do just that.

Starting with the May 2016 issue, long-form “center of the book” stories will carry a byline for the lead writer or writers, and “front” and “back of the book” content will carry a byline or tagline, depending on the story length or page configuration. We will also start running photo credits for in-house photographers.

Of course, any piece of content we produce represents critical contributions made by scores of people at CR — lab staff, our statistics team, advocates, safety experts, and more.  To recognize those contributions, CR magazine frequently quotes many of our experts by name in our stories, and runs a masthead that lists core contributors.

Having writer bylines brings the magazine in line with industry practices and recognizes the excellent work of our staff writers. In keeping with our new internal brand position of “shared insight for choice and change,” we must think of ways both large and small to encourage consumers to share their thoughts and insights; we believe that adding bylines helps humanize the magazine, which in turn will prompt more engagement and conversation with our readers.

We want to acknowledge that one of the most important reasons that magazine bylines were not used for decades was to ensure that consumers understood that articles represented the overall position of CR the organization and not the opinion of any one writer.  However, we are confident that consumers have a clear understanding that all of the content we create reflects the whole of the organization, and that the addition of bylines adds a measure of transparency that consumers today desire when it comes to knowing the sources of their news and information.

Lastly, communications policy updates:

In order to ensure that we make the most of all media opportunities—and that we operate in a OneCR way whenever we interact with the press or other partners—we have updated our communications policies.  You will find the update here.

We hope that everyone will be as excited as we are by all of this good news and recognition of CR talent!