Bill, at first blush, it seems to me that there may be legal reasons to leave the name out of the article. Other than that, I'm not sure why they'd go out of their way to omit the name. I'd love to see an attorney's take on that.

Legal reason? If the person has been arrested or cited, it should be public record. Maybe it has to be a felony before they'll name names?

Next think you know, they'll be mentioning only one political party whenever some scandal breaks.

I'd say that different news outlets have differing standards to when a name can be disclosed. I don't think there's a legal reason that the name can't be published, but some would just have the policy that unless the person is particularly newsworthy, they remain anonymous. I don't really think there's any point in reading any more into it.

The pattern from your examples seems to be that the local outlets (newspaper sites) have the name, but the national outlets (Yahoo, AP) omit it. I'd guess this is AP providing "local" and "national" versions of the same article. Presumably local readers care about the name because they might know the guy, but someone in Montana probably doesn't care about the name of the guy in Vermont. Plus, "the man" is a lot shorter than "Justin Rodebush, 20".

Yeah, MikeW has a point, in each case you cite here one is a local version and the other is not. It's probably just an editorial rule.

Different countries have different laws regarding release of that info, no? Canada seems a bit more reluctant to publish pre-trial conclusion info among others. So an international news distributor may have multiple feeds for different privacy policies, but in the freer countries it would still be up to the buyer (Yahoo, etc.) to decide which feed to run.

I don't think there is a conspiracy here...

"a man in London shot a rocket out of his buttocks"

I've done this several times, but not on purpose!

It's possible that one was released earlier to 'get it out' and the name was added later as it became available through public records, etc. I don't think it has anything to do with censorship, personally. As a regular user of Yahoo news, that's not one of the things I've noticed about it. A far bigger problem is the misleading (you can see an example by clicking my name) and regularly-shifting main page 'headlines' that link to the top stories. I've complained to Yahoo about this before and they claim that they don't 'control' the 'headlines'. I suspect that is you-know-what, personally. But someone, a liberal someone, has demonstrated influence on those headlines. One notable example was last January - one of the headlines was "Dems set to elect first female House Speaker". A very short time later that headline was edited to read "Democrats set to elect first female House Speaker". The donkeys were feeling a little cranky about how they were being referred to around that time, if I recall.

Yahoo has also been quite liberal (pun intended) witht he use of the term 'domestic spying' in their headlines about the international surveillance program. They even use 'domesticspying' in their page names, even though the story doesn't use the term.

So, while there appears to be some fooling around with the news links at Yahoo, I haven't really seen any blanket editing or censoring, not like Google, certainly (which is why I use Yahoo instead of Google).

The 'local' vs. 'national' take is also a decent explanation. A local paper might run the 'long version' of a story while other places just want the shorter 'blurb' version.

I imagine they're paving the way for omitting altogether the names of Democrats who are indicted/arrested in the future.

Yeah, MikeW has a point

Wow, Oyster, you can't even properly credit me when you agree with me! :-P

Brian:

I agree with you, and voted your comment up. Feel better? ;-)

It is local vs other markets. Back in the 80's i belonged to compuserv and they had Executive News service. It allowed you to get wire services (UPI, API,AP,Reuters) news delivered to you. It also provide that you could get articles from world news papers. The same articles varied by content depending on where published.

Some of the previous commenters have the right of it.

Typically, the AP "coverage" of one of these mostly local, but kind of odd/funny stories starts out with the local newspaper running a full article, names and everything. The local or state AP bureau will grab the article, trim it of local color, and slap an AP byline on it.

If the story catches the eye of a national-level editor, that editor will grab the regional article, snip out some more local color, and perhaps even snip out names if they're not important enough.

Complicating this is the fact that for some reason, old-school reporters learn not to put proper names in leads unless the name is Jesus or Elvis. It's pain-in-the-ass rule, quite frankly. So, if you're snipping the unimportant parts of a locally generated story to put it in the national AP "Ain't this local news WACKY!" roundup, you're probably going to trim a few names.

Either that, or some editor at Yahoo! has decided to screw with Bill Jempty's mind.

--|PW|--