[tripzilch]

My thoughts exactly. I think the digging was okay though, for the simple reason that she backed off as soon as he said he wanted to be left alone. And I don't believe a journalist doing research has to interpret silence or no-response as such, but when he communicated this, she let him be.

The second issue was absolutely over the line. It's not so much the name (which is sort-of public knowledge, although the Wikipedia citing issue makes it problematic), but publishing the other personal information really crossed the line, and the article would have been much better without it.

I don't think it's vindictive though, rather a very stupid oversight.

I also think it's too bad that the top comment conflates these two issues, because I think it's very useful to draw the distinction. Spending effort to reach a subject for comment strikes me as proper journalistic research--publishing the PI gathered in the process however, absolutely is not. Even tabloid journalists would simply just publish the comment, but not the addresses or names of employers used in acquiring said comment (be it for different, more competitive reasons, but still).

[jleader]

OK, maybe not intentionally vindictive (only the reporter really knows her motivations for publishing the personal information), but it still bothers me that there's an incentive for the reporter to punish a non-cooperative subject as a way to motivate future subjects to be more cooperative, even if the she wasn't aware of it.