Get me rewrite!

There you go again: skipping the byline at the top of a newspaper article.

It’s not surprising, really. Plunging into another busy day, who has time to stop and consider who’s delivering the information?

News people, in contrast, take their bylines seriously. They love to see them on the front page. They use them to pay homage to their forebears or to assert their ethnic identity. They scan the news pages for their favorite names -- the Los Angeles Times’ vaguely meteorological Rone Tempest, Newsweek’s comic-book monikered Stryker McGuire and the audaciously uncool Peter Schmuck of the Baltimore Sun’s sports pages.

Normally a preoccupation only inside newsrooms, talk about the not-so-modest byline seeped out to some in the outside world in recent weeks. The occasion was the arrival at the New York Times of two reporters bearing the same name.

The local and online press wondered: What to do when Patrick Healy, newly hired metropolitan political reporter joined a staff that already included Patrick Healy, of the newspaper’s Long Island bureau?

Previous Times practice had been to have the last reporter to arrive at the Gray Lady adopt a new byline. (Thus, tax policy reporter David Cay Johnston added his middle name when he joined the paper, to distinguish himself from David Johnston, who covers federal law enforcement.)

The newspaper decided to set the pair apart by having both reporters change their bylines. The 33-year-old political reporter, recently hired from the Boston Globe, became Patrick D. Healy. His 23-year-old colleague became Patrick O’Gilfoil Healy.

The new bylines allowed a smaller change for the elder Healy, who had already established a strong reputation in the business as a 2002 Pulitzer Prize finalist. The other Healy said that by loading up on the Irish -- adding his middle name, from his maternal grandmother -- he pleased some family members but irked his girlfriend. She would have preferred the plainer Jack Healy.

But at the New York Times, all seemed to agree that the Healys had been properly distinguished.

Across the country at the Los Angeles Times, Riverside-based metropolitan reporter Hugo Martin made a more subtle but, to him, no less important adjustment in recent months.

“From the time I became a reporter, I wanted to express something about my Latino heritage,” Martin said. “At one time, I contemplated doing the whole middle name thing but Hugo Umberto Casillas Martin seemed to take it a little too far.”

Then The Times shifted from one computerized news editing system

to another and a simpler solution presented itself. So Hugo Martin

(pronounced MAR-tuhn) became Hugo Martin (mar-TEEN) -- proud son of two immigrants from Jalisco, Mexico.

Surprise: A new name

Newspaper writers have not always had such control over their identities.

Former New York Times executive editor A.M. Rosenthal liked to tell the story of his first byline at the paper, in the 1940s. Editors dispensed bylines parsimoniously in those days and it took a couple of years before Rosenthal earned his first one.

But instead of “Abraham Rosenthal,” an unknown editor plopped the A.M. (for Abraham Michael) Rosenthal atop his first bylined story. No one had any doubt the change was designed to tamp down the young reporter’s Jewish identity. As Rosenthal once explained: “Every Abraham on the New York Times would receive a second circumcision when he got his byline.”

Owners of unusual or lilting bylines see them as assets.

Tempest, a one-time foreign correspondent who currently roves California for the Los Angeles Times, said he often finds news sources and readers ready to talk, curious about his name.

He restrained himself from spilling his full name -- Rone Brenton Tempest III -- onto the page. “Rone Tempest seemed gaudy enough,” he said. “Don’t you think?”

If Tempest’s byline is poetry, Schmuck’s is pure punchline. The quips and taunts became so tiresome that his brother dumped the surname a few years back. California once rejected Peter Schmuck’s request for a personalized license plate, contending that the name was obscene. And when his wife adopted the name after the two married, she happily typed “Linda Schmuck” atop her first post-honeymoon story at the Orange County Register, only to have an editor remove it, declaring: “One Schmuck at the paper is enough.”

“I am a person who doesn’t mind attention,” Peter Schmuck said, explaining his perseverance. “The name just works for me.”

In a journalism world filled with the likes of Shannon Colavecchio-Van Sickler (of the St. Petersburg Times) and Trevor Fishlock (of many British publications), the reigning byline champion (novelty division) may be the New York Times’ Jennifer 8. Lee.

“Jenny 8,” as friends know her, picked up her numeric middle initial in her youth when she and her parents realized she possessed a virulently common name.

To set the teenager apart, the family turned to Chinese numerology’s most auspicious number: 8.

As a reporter intern at the Boston Globe, Lee wrote about her “wacky middle initial” and she continues to win acclaim for it.

But friends said that a proliferation of stories about Lee’s social life -- including acclaimed parties she held while posted in Washington D.C. -- have made her publicity shy. She declined to comment for this story.

While some reporters downplay their attachment to their bylines, most acknowledge the small charge they get seeing their names in print.

Patrick D. Healy (the D is for Durham) recalled that his first byline came with his review of “Superman IV” for the Scituate Mariner, in his native Massachusetts. He was just 16.

“I panned it,” Healy recalled with a laugh. “And I was thrilled to see my name in the paper.”

He would soon come to a realization that has already struck his young colleague. “On most days,” said Patrick O’Gilfoil Healy, “you’re lucky if they get past the headline and into your story, much less stopping to read your byline.”

*

James Rainey can be reached at james.rainey@latimes.com