It’s fine to repeat names a couple of times even in a shorter article.
It’s OK to mix it up a little bit, but sparingly. Some magazine writers and editors way overdo it.
I guess there is some five-cent copywriting school out there that really hammers home some sort of rule around this, which leads to tortuous prose like:
John Doe in trouble again. The Agents of Gunk actor was seen in the car district, sniffing out lamp posts. The 34-year-old has previously been in hot waters, after a glue factory employee claimed to see the East Sussex native getting a little too familiar with his own supply.
Quit it, you only look like a noob when you write like that. Like a crossword maker trying to think up clues and euphemisms, all for the sake of writing more “dynamic” and “varied” prose that ends up being only readable by bar trivia champs. We need to know that John Doe is a 34-year old East Sussex native famous from “Agents of Gunk” in order to unamniguously understand the text. It gets tedious and looks dumb, looms like you’re afraid of just writing the name a couple of extra times, or to rephrase grammar structures when that can disambiguate anaphora.
John Doe in trouble again. He was seen in the car district, sniffing out lamp posts. He has previously been in hot waters, after a glue factory employee claimed to see Doe getting a little too familiar with his own supply.
Much better.
You might think that it was a good thing that the original version told us that this was the guy from Agents of Gunk or his age or where he was from, that it was more info. It didn’t really tell us that, though. We needed to untangle and parse out the sentences and try to figure out what all of this meant. If you insist, you could’ve put in a “The 34-year-old John Doe of East Sussex is most known for his role in Agents of Gunk” paragraph after the lede.
You don’t need to have a cockamamie method of avoiding talking heads either or overly decorate your dialogues. A liberal sprinkling of straight-forward quote attributions “Mr. Doe said” and “Ms. Doe said” can make your texts easier to understand.
Elegance can be opposed to clarity and readability sometimes. When you can have both, that’s wonderful; when you can’t, go with clarity.