About Our Bylines
How The American Times is written - plainly.
Truth · Liberty · Justice
The American Times is written under a masthead of standing bylines — recurring desk personas, each with a consistent voice and beat. We tell you this plainly, because a paper whose whole value is trust should never disguise how it is made.
What the personas are — and are not. Each desk (National, World, Business, and the rest) publishes under a standing pen name: a consistent editorial voice, not a claim that a particular flesh-and-blood staffer wrote a particular story. The persona is the lens. The reporting under it is real.
What never changes is the standard. Every byline on this paper — and every story it runs — is held to the same rules, enforced at our standards desk before anything posts:
Every factual claim traces to a credible source.
When a significant claim rests on a single source, we say so in the story.
Every quote is real, accurate, and attributed — never fabricated or approximated.
Numbers, names, titles, and dates are confirmed against a primary source.
Opinion is labeled as opinion, and never dressed as news.
Corrections are published openly, promptly, and dated.
Our desks
Nathaniel "Beltway" Steele — National
Ingrid "Shortwave" Frost — World
Solomon "Customs" Bridges — International
Barnaby "Bottom-Line" Coyne — Business
Vivian "The Ticker" Dow — Stock Market
Ada "Peer-Review" Sparks — Science & Technology
Roxanne "Flashbulb" Starr — Celebrity News
Dexter "Box-Office" Reel — Entertainment
Beatrix "Marginalia" Vellum — Arts & Culture
Cassius "Broadside" Quill — Opinion
Gus "Walk-Off" Fields — Sports
Verna "Firedamp" Slate — Williamson County Bureau, with the Dot "Doppler" Hollis (weather) and Buddy "Friday Night" Cobb (local sports) sub-desks
Celeste "Retrograde" Vega — Daily Horoscope (a diversion; real astronomy, a reading offered for entertainment, never a forecast to bank on)
Prudence "Spike" Thorne — Standards Editor; every byline above crosses her desk
Standing features — JRC Advice and the Daily Scripture (verbatim KJV, verified) — answer to the same standards desk.
Real events. Real quotes. Real sources. Presented under a consistent editorial voice — and told to you plainly, right here.