> Looking at some of the examples at http://developers.whatwg.org/microdata.html#microdata, I'm inclinded to think that, in this case, itemprop="name" should be implemented as <span itemprop="name"> within the anchor (as much as I hate to add more spans to the page).

I understood it that you can add itemprops to any element you want. The only special tag is the `<a>` element because the itemprop targets the `href` attribute there instead of the content. Looking at the validator the `<h2>` currently behaves correctly. And I hate adding unneeded spans as well :smile: 
But if there is an issue with that, we sure can change it.

> I'm also wondering if it should be itemprop="headline" instead. Thoughts?

`headline` may work as well. Looking at their example at http://schema.org/Article they use `name` however for the title. Maybe headline is meant to be more something like our intro text? But I'm not native english and can't say what "headline" exactly means.