In a modest proposal called “Death to bylines” Craig Stoltz suggests that online news stories are really brought to light collectively. The reporter’s words take form with the help of an assignment editor, online producer, perhaps a photographer. Like modest proposals before it, it is contentious.

Stoltz further provokes further by suggesting that journalists who opt out of collective and multiple bylines can become part of a news organization’s “self-pruning staff.”

A typesetter for the frontpage of the WSJ in the years of “cold type” never got a byline, even when he corrected typos, so the issue of how a story gets online and which contributors to its digitization deserve credit or no, is not new and probably won’t go away soon.

In “Off the Bus ” the collaboration of newassignment.net and Huffington post there are going to be issues of attribution and bylines. At YearlyKos, Jay Rosen asked what to call person who collates the information collected by bloggers, citizen journalists and “crowds” into a form that a professional journalist can use to write a story. What is that job to be called? Boss blogger? Knowledge wrangler? How much credit should a knowledge wrangler get?

New tools will make for new news and new kinds of attribution and bylines. Take chicagocrime.org a site that uses Citizen I-Cam data, Google maps, and django programming to allow a viewer to generate all kind of news and reports, such as a list of crimes on a potential jogging or biking route.

With few limits on column inches, pages, or time, online news hybrids, where multimedia that exists gets “mashed up” with newly created multimedia, text, and reporting, producing news rooted in context can evolve. Many “digital natives” (born 1981 or after)express a preference stories that link to background and context of issues and news. Work like this is out there, and it calls for new kinds of bylines that are focused on a team.

Just as ways of framing stories for print evolved into new forms with the medium of radio, and then with the medium of television, so will ways of framing news evolve with for interactive, online media. And our ideas about bylines will have to evolve and expand as well.