I have a website with news articles, and I'm trying to employ the schema.org's structured data. It says that the name property is required, but I don't really know what it should hold.
In a news article, the title of the article should go under the headline property, the author name is under author. So it's a bit unclear what the name property has left to hold?
The only thing Schema.org has to say about it, is that it should be "The name of the item", and that the value should be of a text type. And the name of the item is its title.. but that seems like duplicating content, and Google is sometimes scary in its policy to punish duplicated content. So I am unsure what to do here.
First of all, Schema.org does not require the name (or any other) property.
You are probably talking about what Google requires for one of their search result features (if you don’t follow their requirements, you don’t get that feature; nothing else happens), and/or what the AMP spec did require (see their issue about headline vs. name).
The headline property will in many cases have the same value like the name property. Using both properties for the same content is perfectly fine (in Microdata: itemprop="headline name"; in RDFa: property="headline name"; in JSON-LD you would have to provide the value a second time). The talk about "duplicate content" is about two or more pages that have the same content, not about two or more properties that have the same content.
There was a discussion some time ago (in #423 and in #205) about deprecating headline and suggesting that authors use name instead, but this didn’t happen (yet).
