Tweeting and social networking are letting a hundred thousand press barons bloom without any accountability. And this mass mediatocracy reveals the universal trait behind all penmanship, virtual or otherwise: the desire for Klout. The fact that Knoller’s power was checked by Twitter because he was a journalist just did the mediaverse a huge favor: it reminded everyone that the freedom of the press requires accountability — and accountability demands a separation of the professional journalist from the personal, peeved tweeter.

We need to treat news as if it were no different than booze, with moderate consumption being as good for the head as moderate drinking is for the heart. Too much, however, and you become a menace to yourself and the world, constantly fretting about imaginary threats and all encompassing conspiracies.

The original story of Times New Roman’s genesis goes like this: Morison wrote a blistering article in 1929 arguing that Times Old Roman, the font of The Times of London, was dated, clunky, badly printed and in need of help — his help. The paper listened and charged Morison with directing the creation of a new suite of letters. He did, and on Oct. 3, 1943, Times New Roman debuted on the bright white broadsheets of the London daily.

Here’s the problem with this tidy account: Evidence found in 1987 — drawings for letters and corresponding brass plates — suggests that the real father of the font wasn’t a typographer at all, but a wooden boat designer from Boston named William Starling Burgess.

Journalism just doesn’t feel comfortable with interpreting news or reporting or analyzing numbers, so the criteria for accurate science reporting have become limited to those facts that were clearly objective and understandable — did I quote Professor X accurately, get his title right, correctly report what his research says? Which means we end up with the perplexing situation that, even though there is nothing inaccurate with the media coverage of the addiction study, we’d be wrong to accept the coverage — or the authors’ policy recommendations — at face value.