: Re: How can I distance myself from an article published under my name, with edits I disagree with? I wrote an article for a university newspaper that summarizes incidents involving racism on campus.

@Speyer920

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I was the editor of my university paper back in the day. Chris Sunami's answer is right; university newspapers are produced by amateurs, people learning the trade (who might not even be taking journalism-related coursework), and they sometimes err. In addition to following the very good advice from Chris, you can ask for a retraction in the next edition. A conventional wording would be something like this:

The article (title) published in the (date) edition was incorrectly attributed to (author). (Publication name) regrets the error.

Normally there would be a sentence after the first one like "the article was actually written by X"; if you'd be more comfortable having the person who edited it (or the editorial team) take full responsibility, even though you wrote the first draft, you could ask for that. Without some attribution some readers will wonder, but newspapers have other "unsigned" content too, like editorials (usually). It sounds like your article was an opinion or analysis piece, and sometimes those are group efforts, so while leaving the attribution "hanging" like this might raise a few eyebrows, it won't be that unusual.

For online content they can also attach this to the page itself -- update the author credit at the top, and at the bottom include a note like "An earlier version of this article was published with incorrect attribution".

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