The reluctance to change: a history lesson.

Editorial writers tell their readers how things can be done differently and better: Reduce class size in the schools to bring up the reading level of the students; assign additional police officers to districts where there has been widespread drug dealing; plant more trees along the city's busiest streets.

That's good. As times change, so also must the related and affected activities change.

But what about the editorial page itself?. Journalism is changing. Are editorial pages doing the same?

I asked Robert L. Bartley, editor of The Wall Street Journal, about the possibility of changing from unsigned to signed editorials. Not signing editorials, he replied, is a "tradition about as old as journalism - and traditions are usually based on sound reasons even if they can't be crisply articulated."

But if we take a quick glance at his understanding of the history of editorials, we can see some problems.

It is true that when editorials first began to appear in American newspapers near the end of the 18th century, they were not signed. They did not have to be signed. An editorial was an article written by the editor, and the readers knew who the editor was. In 1800, for example, the New York American Citizen and General Advertisers was known as "Mr. David Denniston's paper."

Earlier, the New York American Minerva was Mr. Noah Webster's paper. Editors were as familiar to their readers as parents are to their children.

When newspaper staffs became larger, some of the great editors began to sign their editorials. By 1850, for instance, Horace Greeley's Tribune had a staff of 12, and he was signing his most important writings, including the 1862 "Prayer of Twenty Million" that urged Lincoln to declare free all slaves who had escaped into the Union lines. The signed editorial brought a prompt - and published - reply from the president.

But even if Bartley's appeal to tradition must be peppered with qualifications and exceptions, that was not his only point. "Editorials," he also said, "at least at their best, are something more than the opinion of one person . . . in our cases reflecting not only collaborative discussions but a tradition reaching back a century." And, "I don't know whose name we would sign - the editor who came up with the idea, the writer who reported it and did the first drain, or the editor who rewrote and crafted the final prose."

Is it really so difficult, as Bartley claims, to determine to which person an editorial should be credited?

It turned out not to be so when William H. Grimes of The Wall Street Journal was identified as the writer who should receive the 1947 Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing. Six years later, at the same paper, it was determined that Vermont C. Royster had written the prize-winning editorials. And, when someone picked out the author of those editorials that resulted in the 1980 Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing, we discover they were written by, of all persons, the WSJ's Robert L. Bartley himself.

In other words, when it comes time to select editorials for submission to the Pulitzer Prize board - and to the hundreds of other national, state, and local groups that give awards each year for editorial writing - papers have no difficulty determining who deserves credit for "their best." Yet most of the large papers refuse to supply this same information to their readers at the time the editorials are first published.

Howell Raines, editorial page editor of The New York Times, doesn't deny that the writers are known; he simply claims there is no need to provide this information to the readers. "Our publisher's view," he writes, "is that the editorial represents the institutional voice of NYT and therefore need not be signed by the writers or editors who work on it."

If one were to admit that there is some value, even today, to a paper's proclaiming its institutional voice, one would still have to insist that such a practice does not require editorial anonymity.

Let's consider an analogy: One of the major institutions of our society - the Supreme Court of the United States - utters its institutional opinion numerous times each year. Those major opinions are not unsigned.

The other judges may agree with the opinion of the Court, but then write another signed opinion setting forth additional thoughts. They may agree with the decision of the Court but not with the opinion that was written and produce a concurring opinion. They may disagree with the decision and write a dissenting opinion. Or they may agree with the views written by any of the other judges and simply add their names to it.

Even those who might agree that the foundations upon which unsigned editorials rest are weak and porous refuse to consider alternatives. They claim that no great harm is done, and no alternative is worth pursuit.

There are, fortunately, some who are not so complacent.

Michael Gartner, editor of the Daily Tribune in Ames, Iowa, and winner of the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing, is one of them. "I've thought a lot about the issue in the past couple of years, and I think that while the theory of the 'voice of the newspaper' is right, the newspaper also owes a duty to its readers to let them know who is saying what. . . . I rail against anonymous sources all the time, yet I am an anonymous writer also every day in my newspaper.

"So I might well change our policy."

As Gartner recognized, newspapers demand that every letter to the editor be signed by the person who wrote it, no matter whether the letter expresses a personal view or the position of a company, organization, or other institution. No letter will be published if the only given source is merely "General Motors" or "The American Red Cross" or the "State Department." Yet every day editorials are published in which the source is identified merely as "this newspaper."

The News Sentinel in Fort Wayne, Ind., has been publishing signed editorials for more than five years. Editorial page editor Leo Morris says, "The response has been overwhelmingly popular with readers. The first reaction of most people is to ask the obvious: How come you haven't always done this? . . . It makes the page more accessible, the give and take of opinion more personal." And, he adds, "I think it's made us better, more careful writers."

Husbands and wives sometimes disagree with one another; the same happens with editorial writers, even those who are usually of one mind. Almost always, the public would benefit from reading the different views of persons whose very job it is to think about and write about the problems that affect the community. But only if each writer signed his or her editorial could the benefits of these divergent views be made available to the readers. If a newspaper is fortunate enough to have a large editorial staff, it could provide the readers with all the diversity - or unanimity - that is provided by our courts of final appeal.

The world is changing. So also are newspapers. Only on editorial pages do some papers continue to exhibit a reluctance to change.

NCEW life member Warren Bovee is professor emeritus of journalism at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisc.