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martine wrote:Both articles are asking for witnesses to come forward...stating the car make may help jog someone's memory.

Horse wrote:Women have complained for ages that newspaper reports always state their age.

I’ve been a journalist for 40 years, and learned in journalism school to identify a person by age and city of residence to distinguish that person from another person of the same name. As you can imagine, if you simply wrote that Bill McNamara was charged with a serious crime, you would probably have dozens of people with that name sue you for libel. But if you wrote that the person was Bill McNamara, 37, of Pleasantville, New York, you would have narrowed it down—even more so if you used that person’s middle initial. If you read news articles from 60 or 70 years ago, you’ll notice reporters went one step further and included the person’s home address too, but that led to problems in itself, so the practice has largely been discontinued. All these personal identifiers are used to further accurate reporting, not voyeurism.

—Mark Orwoll, 63, in Pleasantville, New York