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Adrienne LaFrance writes about research showing that first-person singular pronouns are supplanting the plural "we" and says that experts differ on what if anything that shift says about broader social trends: "Even in science writing, where personal pronouns were once forbidden, some journals are now open to informal, active language — though "we" has gained acceptance more quickly than "I." (The most prestigious journals still strictly discourage first-person.)"

Long gone are the printers who were a last line of defense against sloppy journalism. Gone, too, are many line editors. One who survives, Peter Robins of Britain's The Spectator, writes about some expensive typos, including a missing hyphen that doomed the Mariner 1 spacecraft: "There is still no substitute for a skilled proofreader — preferably one coming to the material fresh, so that there are no previous drafts or expectations to get between them and the text."

Dianna Wray, a Houston Press staff writer, dug into court records for an award-winning story on non-profit and public hospitals that sue poverty-stricken patients for unpaid bills, and Joseph Burns examines her process in a post for the Association of Health Care Journalists: "Wray’s article is a good place to start for anyone covering how nonprofit and public hospitals are suing the uninsured and other patients with few resources to pay for expensive medical care."

Poynter's Butch Ward recounts his six-month transition from a newspaper job to a health insurance company. His advice to others on the job search: Just ask for help. "While many job seekers might hesitate to call people who help run universities, sports franchises, big companies and other organizations, journalists routinely seek interviews with people in positions of power and influence. It impressed me how many of those people said yes, I’d be happy to talk with you."

Maria Konnikova writes about an Australian psychologist and cognitive neuroscientist who studies how a headline's wording influences — for better or worse — what a reader remembers from a story: "By drawing attention to certain details or facts, a headline can affect what existing knowledge is activated in your head. By its choice of phrasing, a headline can influence your mindset as you read so that you later recall details that coincide with what you were expecting."

"If you read all of the above works you will glean profound insight into most of what has driven the history of the western world," the ubiquitous astrophysicist and science popularizer writes at the end of a list quoted by Maria Popova. Tyson's suggestions include Charles Darwin and Isaac Newton, as well as Machiavelli and Sun Tzu, but not, as Popova notes, anything written by a woman: "Tyson’s selections remain indispensable despite their chromosomal lopsidedness."

When Rolling Stone ran a now-discredited story on campus rape and New York followed with one about a supposed teenage multimillionaire, Rona Kobell thought back to her own early experience with a source who spun a fanciful resume. What she learned: "People lie to reporters. They tell a lot of little lies, and sometimes they tell big lies. They claim degrees that they never earned and jobs they never held. They lie to their friends, and they lie to themselves."

Dr. Lawrence Altman wrote the first AIDS story for the New York Times in July 1981. He reflects on the early coverage in an interview with Cari Romm: "There were complaints that AIDS was getting too much attention early on at the expense of other diseases. But when you’re dealing with a communicable disease, there’s probably going to be a disproportionate amount of attention in news media, because that’s something people can take action on and do something about."

Maria Popova beats the rush with a top-15 list including E.O. Wilson, poet/biologist Joanna Tilsley, and illustrator Annu Kilpeläinen, whose "simple yet imaginative primer on science via art explores natural selection, continental drift, what killed the dinosaurs, how birds descended from them, and all the other processes and phenomena that took us to where we are today. Die-cut delights add an element of interactive playfulness to the classic coloring-book experience."

It took some willpower for Elizabeth Howell to keep her vacation work-free. While she was visiting the Endeavour exhibit in Los Angeles, both the Antares rocket and SpaceShipTwo crashed to the ground: "I received interview requests concerning these incidents shortly after they occurred, and turned them down. Yes, it might have helped my career to take time out of my vacation to cover these stories, but I was okay with passing these up to try to get back home refreshed."