It's that time again, time for a look back at the year that was, time to try to make sense of it all. What did 2012 tell us about the state of the news business? What are the lessons to be learned? And what should we expect in the year to come?

Here are my thoughts.

Years ago I had a student who was a real chatterbox. From the time she walked into class each morning until the moment she left, she was talking, talking, talking.

There's nothing wrong with that per se. Some of the best reporters have the kind of gregarious personalities that go hand-in-hand with chattiness.

The problem was, her articles for the student newspaper were under-reported efforts that usually couldn't be published. She wasn't a bad writer, but the information just wasn't there.

You've probably guessed the problem. Good reporters need to be - have to be - good listeners. Whether they're covering a speech, a school board meeting or doing a one-on-one interview, reporters have to listen closely to what's being said, then get what they've heard - quotes, background information and so on - into their notebooks or recorders so they can eventually put that material into their stories.

But the chatty Cathy in my class was too busy talking to ever stop and listen. The result was that her stories, instead of being a rich stew of solid reportage, were more like a thin gruel a la Dickens' Oliver Twist.

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It's something of a trend in journalism right now: Reporters who let sources decide which quotes of theirs can be used in a story.

It's a practice that's especially widespread in political coverage. On the 2012 campaign trail, both the Obama and Romney camps demand quote approval. "Politicians and their advisers are routinely demanding that reporters allow them final editing power" over quotes, Jeremy Peters of The New York Times reported.

Meanwhile, Michael Lewis, who received virtually unfettered access to President Obama for his profile in Vanity Fair, has revealed that he also had to agree to give the White House the final say on which quotes from their many interviews could be used.

Such revelations have prompted much soul-searching among news outlets. The Times has said it's reviewing its policy on quote approval. The National Journal banned the practice, and The Associated Press trumpeted the fact that it never allowed it in the first place.

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A recent New York Times article on research into caloric restriction illustrates one of the pitfalls of science reporting - namely, that scientists are just as human as the rest of us.

The article, by Gina Kolata, is about a study in which rhesus monkeys were kept for 25 years on severely restricted diets. The result? The monkeys were so thin they were roughly the equivalent of a a 6-foot-tall man who weighed around 120 pounds.

The purpose of the study was to discover whether monkeys kept on such a diet would live longer. Earlier studies on lab rats, flies and worms had indicated that severely restricted diets might indeed result in longer lives.

And as the Times article makes clear, the earlier caloric restriction studies had led scientists to hope that the study on monkeys, who are much more similar to humans, might yield similar results.

But it didn't. The semi-starved rhesus monkeys lived no longer than monkeys fed a normal diet.

What's interesting is the disappointment of the researchers involved. They wanted their study to show that semi-starvation prolonged life. They wanted it to be true because such a finding might someday lead to ways of extending human life.

Of course, scientists aren't supposed to think that way. They're supposed to be objective, dispassionate seekers of truth. They develop a theory, then subject that theory to rigorous experimentation. If the theory isn't borne out in the lab, then it's discarded.

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The games have, if only briefly, shone a light amid the gloom. Set aside for a moment the enormous success of Team USA to consider Oscar Pistorius, the South African man who ran the 400 meters on two prosthetic legs, all the way to the semifinals. Or Sarah Attar, the first woman from ultraconservative Saudi Arabia to compete in track and field at the Olympics. She ran the 800 meters covered from head to toe, and though she finished far behind her nearest competitor there were waves and waves of applause as she crossed the finish line. Progress.

But let's resist the temptation to politicize the games; they are, in the end, about the transformation that occurs in the human spirit when the human body is pushed to its ultimate limits; or, more modestly, about the joys of the physical.

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