Petey --

Take a deep breath; there's no big conspiracy here.

Here's some sausage-making information:

Newspapers across the country subscribe to various wire services, including Associated Press and Reuters (the two main providers of basic coverage), the Los Angeles Times/Washington Post service, the New York Times service, Bloomberg, McClatchy, etc. Almost every paper subscribes to AP and/or Reuters; the others (LATWP. NYT, etc.) are considered "supplemental" services, meaning that they do not have the breadth of coverage that AP or Reuters does (but they often delve into topics on a more analytical or deeper level).

Headlines are written by copy editors at each individual newspaper, so the headline on a story in the Washington Post will be different from the headlines in other newspapers that pick up that same story from the LATWP wire. Headlines are written to fit the column width alloted to each story, and that is different in each newspaper. Often stories will be sent out on the wire with "suggested" headlines, but that's all they are -- suggestions -- and they are most often not the same headlines that appear in the paper. In addition, each paper has its own standards of propriety -- it may be OK to use the words "oral sex" in a headline in the Washington Post, but not OK in Palm Beach.

Editing is a matter of individual judgment at each newspaper. Often it has to do with the amount of space available, and that depends on the number of ads sold and the size of those ads. (On the inside pages, news fills in the space around the ads.)

Sometimes, as in the case of this Palm Beach Post article, the editors will take what they consider to be the most relevant information from the wire services they subscribe to and combine it into one story -- you'll note that the credit line for the article you linked to is "Palm Beach Post wire services".

There is no "rule" requiring that stories sent out on the wire be run by every subscribing paper at the full length; as a national news wire editor in the early 1980s, I would often take a few graphs from AP, a few from LATWP, maybe some from Reuters, some background from previous stories we had run on a similar topic and put it all together under the credit line "From [paper's name] wire services." That's perfectly legitimate (though if one story had exclusive quotes, I'd attribute those along the lines of ".... Sen. Blowhard told Associated Press").

It may be that because of the recent story about your circumstances, the editors in Palm Beach thought that just a short story noting the Hopkins study was sufficient. The important thing is that information about this study is being published in newspapers across the country, and that is good news for all of us.

-- Leslie