Sometimes, news articles start with the name of a city.
E.g.
Washington, DC: Rioters continue to… blah…
or
CHICAGO: A meeting was held to discuss…and there was much rejoicing…the governor made a statement…
How is this city determined? I can think of a few possibilities:
It is the location that the article was physically written (e.g. if the article is based on research conducted in New York, but the reporter actually wrote the article during a layover in Denver, then the article would start “Denver:”).
It is the location of publication (e.g. an article originally published in the LA Times would always be “Los Angeles:”, even if it was about a shark attack in Miami, Florida that was based on interviews with victims who had been moved to an Orlando, Florida hospital, and the article was actually written from the notes at the reporter’s office in Memphis)
In the judgment of the author, it most closely matches the subject matter of the article (e.g. the shark attack article would start “Miami:…” even if it was originally published in the LA Times, was based on research done in Orlando, and the article was written in Memphis)
There is no standard - each reporter or periodical decides for themself what it means.
ETA: the italic text above, which might explain the OP’s question. Take this post as further information rather than the answer I had hoped it would be.
Because, as the linked article points out, the date is often omitted.
The term dateline came about before the invention of the telegraph, when news traveled slowly. A story might be days or even weeks old when first reported. With the advent of near instant communication, it can now be assumed that the date of the story matches the date of the publication.
The AP says (my stylebook is a bit out of date, so this may have changed some)
So if a reporter is working in a city to gather the info, that’s the dateline. In your (1), the dateline would probably be NEW YORK.
The book goes on to say that when you’re obtaining info secondhand, things change a bit – if you’re writing primarily based on another newspaper article, you don’t use the dateline that the newspaper used, you use the home city of the paper. So if I’m writing a story about the L.A. Times’ story about new legislation in Congress, they would have used a WASHINGTON dateline, but I should use a LOS ANGELES dateline.
It also says if I’m basing a story on a radio broadcast that I’m listening to from somewhere the radio station isn’t, I should use the dateline from the city where I’m listening. If I was listening to the WLS radio station out of Chicago but picking it up in Indianapolis, apparently that story should be datelined INDIANAPOLIS (and the book also says to mention that fact in the story, so I’d probably put something like “WLS radio, broadcasting from Chicago, reported…”
It also says that foreign datelines should be used only if info was provided from someone physically present from the datelined place, and that stories where you’re compiling info from many varied sources, you need no dateline.
Other than AP’s guidelines, individual organizations may have their own guidelines (many orgs will omit datelines from their home city in their own publications, for example). There’s no official “ruling body” as to what dateline should go on a story – it’s an editor’s judgment call in most cases.
Better that it be the primary location of the story, I think, or the nearest big city. The average reader is only going to care about where the gist of the story occurred.
Reminds me of one of my favorite early journalism stories:
As a reporter, future Ohio governor and 1920 presidential candidate James M. Cox once went to a town where a massive railroad accident had occurred. Other reporters went directly to the scene of the accident, but Cox instead went to the town’s only telegraph office, where he hired the telegraph operator to begin transmitting the Bible to his newspaper, telling the operator he would be back. (Under the law of the day, once a message was begun, it could not be interrupted by others). Cox went to the accident site, gathered all the information he needed, and wrote his article. He then returned to the telegraph office, which he found full of frustrated reporters waiting to make use of the telegraph. Cox handed his article to the telegraph operator and thus scooped all of the other reporters.
News organizations generally designate an official stylebook (the default seems to be the Associated Press stylebook), and major news organizations will have their own.
Editors are expected to enforce the standards set forth in the stylebook.
Here’s a journalism think-tank piece on the topic:
*When a dateline appears on a bylined story, it suggests that the reporter has been to the dateline location to gather most of the information. If that is not the case, the story should not carry a dateline but should explain how the information was gathered. *
For a reporter to claim as a dateline a place where he or she was not actually on the ground is generally a dismissal offense.
If that’s the policy of the particular news organization, sure. But as I said, there’s no overarching “Board of Journalism Standards and Practices” or something enforcing that.
There are plenty of exceptions: Lots of small publications dateline things from small towns when their reporters were based in the newsroom and called their interviews (or rewrote press releases or took phoned-in sports scores or whatever). The AP stylebook, as I posted above, says you should dateline the home city of a newspaper when it’s your primary source (presumably even if you’re not in that same city, which seems weird to me but it’s what the book says).
To me too, a dateline suggests the reporter was actually, physically there. To others, that may not be the case. Different organizations, different policies (different editors, different interpretations of those policies). The AP’s definition is as close as we’re going to get for a “standardized” answer to the question, and even then it’s a daily judgment call by the people publishing the story.
Reminds me that in the Eighties, the NPR reporter covering the various unpleasantnesses in Lebanon would always end his reports with “Joe Blow, NPR, Nicosia.” Your average listener wouldn’t know that Nicosia is in Cyprus, an island far removed from Lebanon but much safer for the reporter than reporting on the scene.
Actually, your average NPR listener might know that. But that’s the point – it’s a kind of disclaimer.
Yes, this is very, very common. In newspaper stories taking place very close to the newsroom, it’s routine for the dateline to be the location of the story, even if the reporter did it all from his or her desk.