Thomson Reuters bylines reporter who never was

“A few years ago, Boatley was cranking out stories left and right — short pieces about law firm layoffs, merger deals, and firm expansions. Then she vanished,” US media watcher Jim Romenesko reported on his eponymous blog. “People who knew the secret about Boatley thought she had been killed — by her editors.”

Romenesko said the prolific legal writer was not real, but a creation of ALB bosses. “They also used a fake George Beveridge byline on occasion, I’m told, but I can’t find any of his stories.

“The names were there to make it look as if the ALB teams were bigger than they really were,” one of Romenesko’s sources wrote in an e-mail. “Also, so editors don’t have to use their own names on certain stories (no particular reason).”

ALB editors set up a fake Google e-mail account for Boatley a few years ago after an Australian PR firm tried to contact her about an error in a story.

The firm’s e-mail to her, which had ALB’s standard e-mail address format,  kept bouncing back, so they contacted another ALB journalist who alerted editors to the no-contact-information problem, and a real e-mail account was set up for the fake reporter.

A Facebook page was also created for the fictional reporter. It’s a sad space, though: Boatley only has two Friends displayed on the page — her editor, Renu Prasad, and fake journalist George Beveridge.

Romenesko said he had asked Prasad and Thomson Reuters communications vice president Barb Burg about the company’s policy on fake bylines “and will post their comments when/if they come in”.

In an update, Romenesko quoted the following from a source on why the Boatley byline reappeared: “Reporter Olivia Collings had left ALB recently to join a law firm so Boatley’s name was probably used again to ‘boost staff count.’” ■