Nearly 7,000 Americans may have picked up a parasite that pays you back with weeks of severe diarrhea. 1,645 confirmed so far. Michigan alone is carrying 4,312 cases and 102 hospitalizations. * NBC News put it this way: “Iceberg lettuce supplier investigated as possible source in cyclosporiasis outbreak.” An iceberg lettuce supplier. Out there somewhere. Unnamed. Could be anybody — it's a big world, and so much of it is lettuce. * Now read NBC's own first paragraph, which arrives roughly one inch later: the FDA is investigating “iceberg lettuce supplied to Taco Bell by Taylor Farms.” Both names. Sentence one. The headline wasn't guarding information the newsroom didn't have. The information was sitting directly underneath it, wearing a nametag. * And then there's the plumbing, which never learned to lie. The address NBC filed the story under reads: fda-names-source-cyclosporiasis-outbreak. The link says the source got named. The headline names nobody. Somewhere between the CMS and the front page, two companies quietly took off their badges. * The Washington Post ran the same reporting and simply said the thing out loud: “CDC, FDA link Taco Bell lettuce supplier to multistate cyclosporiasis outbreak.” Taco Bell. In the headline. Where the reader lives. The building did not collapse. * Though the Post shouldn't take too deep a bow — its own URL hedges the other direction, muttering about a “potential source” and “investigators say.” Two newsrooms, two stories, and in both of them the headline and the web address are having slightly different conversations. One got braver on the way up. One got shyer. * Here's why the nametag matters, and it isn't a grammar hobby. Most people never open the story. They get the headline, in a feed, somewhere between a weather alert and a cousin's holiday photos. “Iceberg lettuce supplier” asks a hungry person to do nothing at all — you cannot avoid an anonymous supplier at lunchtime. “Taco Bell” is a headline you can act on before 1 p.m. * None of this is a scoop problem or a sourcing problem. NBC had it, printed it, and put it first. It just wrote a headline that reads like a subpoena everyone agreed not to serve. * An outbreak big enough to hospitalize a hundred people in one state, and the headline hands the microphone to a vegetable.