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The standards for selecting datelines are no longer as firm and fixed as they once were, but the older standard was that the dateline was to be the place where the reporter wrote the story, not necessarily where the story took place. The argument was that a reporter should not use a dateline of a city where he or at least an assistant was not physically present, because it could cause people to wrongly think the reporter had “boots on the ground” when the reporter was not there.

OK, so the reporters of the original Reuters article may have written their story from New York and followed the journalistic standard for datelines. But that in itself is a problem, because not only are New York and Salt Lake City 2,000 miles apart geographically, they are widely different culturally, especially with respect to the subject at hand. I would go so far as to suggest that Reuters' New York writers were chosen to do the initial story because it would be much more gay marriage friendly. So there were no "boots on the ground" for the original Reuters story, which is a major reason why it turned out as biased, inaccurate, and deceptive as it did.

You may be right, but it's important to remember that Reuters, unlike the Associated Press, is predominantly a foreign wire service and they've cut back on their non-European coverage much like American media have cut back on foreign bureaus.

I would be very surprised if Reuters has a correspondent in or anywhere near Salt Lake City. Internationally speaking, Utah isn't that important.

Reuters probably does have someone on the West Coast, however, but that likely would have generated a Los Angeles or some other California dateline.

This New York dateline on a Utah story may end up remaining a mystery that never gets answered because internal story assignment decisions generally don't get discussed because they're usually not interesting to readers.

But who knows? Free Republic being what it is, it wouldn't surprise me if some FOX News or Washington Times reporter shows this thread to a friend at Reuters and says, “Look at the debate you generated!”