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The tail end of Brett Kavanaugh's Supreme Court nomination process released a powerful next phase in the #MeToo movement, as women poured out their previously untold stories of sexual assault. The political wrangling, meanwhile, provoked a furious, largely partisan, clash.

Two stories entwined, each offering multiple individual threads to explore. NPR's listeners and readers found plenty to praise and also to critique across the 12 hours of live special coverage and extensive newsmagazine and online coverage.

Longstanding NPR policy is to reserve the title of "Dr." for an individual who holds a doctor of dental surgery, medicine, optometry, osteopathic medicine, podiatric medicine or veterinary medicine.

NPR's Planet Money team specializes in making complex economic stories compelling and understandable. That often means stripping stories down to essentials and using anecdotes as a story device (the "show, not tell" school of journalism). The approach, which is dependent on deep reporting and very precise and tightly constructed storytelling, has worked well for a decade.

NPR newsroom leaders have concluded their investigation into the work of a longtime freelance contributor, Danielle Karson, one month after they said they had discovered she had recycled sound bites in some of her radio reports.

Newsrooms aren't perfect. Trustworthy newsrooms, however, make adjustments (preferably quickly) when their errors are pointed out.

Earlier this summer, we shared an update about our ongoing work for the NPR App and invited app users to help us test and develop new features. Many of you responded, and we're incredibly thankful to those who did. Inspired by your insights and suggestions, we've been hard at work over the past few months improving the app experience, fixing bugs, and developing some features that we think you'll be excited about.

This office gets weekly complaints about what is perceived to be an imbalance in guests: There are too many Republicans interviewed and not enough Democrats. Or vice versa. Or a partisan from one side is interviewed without a corresponding counterpoint.

So I was pleased to see that NPR on Friday pulled back the curtain a bit about its attempts last week to book politicians to discuss the Paul Manafort verdict and the Michael Cohen guilty plea: The scarcity of Republican politicians, in this case (as occasionally happens with Democrats, too), wasn't for a lack of trying.

Morning Edition listeners will have noticed this week that the newscasts, or headlines, have moved around. Newscasts had aired each hour at 1 minute after the hour and again at 19 minutes and 42 minutes after the hour. Now, while there is the same amount of newscast time, it is grouped in just two breaks, at more intuitive times at the top and bottom of the hour — as was the case for most of Morning Edition's nearly four-decade history.

Sunday's "Unite the Right 2" rally across from the White House was a bust, when just a couple of dozen protesters turned up. But the outrage against NPR over its coverage leading up to the event will likely live for a long time.

NPR said Friday that it discovered that a longtime freelance contributor, Danielle Karson, had recycled sound bites in more than two dozen reports that aired from 2011 until recently. NPR has handled the discovery, which was made by a producer and an editor, quickly and transparently, as it should.

Wildfires are ravaging hundreds of thousands of acres of the western United States and Canada this summer, taking lives and homes in California, closing parts of Yosemite National Park to visitors and racing through forests and grasslands in Idaho, Washington, Oregon, Utah, Colorado and British Columbia. Smoke from those fires is causing breathing difficulties as far away as Maine.

In recent weeks, the Ombudsman's Office received complaints from listeners and readers about a handful of specific words used by the newsroom. These listeners and readers argued that the words have racial histories that made them inappropriate.

This is an ongoing concern of NPR audience members: words that are in common usage, but that a growing number of people now understand have racial or ethnic roots that make them offensive to some, at least in some situations.

In a message to newsroom staff, Senior Supervising Editor of NPR's International Desk Will Dobson shared the following staffing update.

Everyone,

The Korean peninsula has seen no shortage of breaking news in recent months. So I regret that I must break the next piece of news: Elise Hu is leaving her post in Seoul.  

Behind the Stories features perspectives from the reporters, editors and producers who create NPR's content, offering insights into how and why they do what they do. For this post, we talked with Investigations Correspondent Howard Berkes about his recent work on "Black Lung Returns To Coal Country," a series he has reported off-and-on for years.

Last week, NPR released the fourth year of internal studies examining the diversity of its sources: people who are interviewed or quoted in stories, either on-air or online.

Late in 2015, this office released the third-year results of an internal NPR study examining the diversity of the outside sources heard on NPR's weekday radio newsmagazines. (Outside sources are the people interviewed and quoted by NPR; they do not include NPR's own reporters and hosts.) Now we have a fourth year of that analysis, this time looking at the makeup of the sources that NPR used in five online blogs during the 2016 fiscal year (Oct.

On June 30, NPR's Weekend All Things Considered aired a lighthearted World Cup piece discussing why the Brits use "football" and the Americans use "soccer" to refer to the same game. The subsequent debate this piece sparked has nothing to do with soccer and is not remotely lighthearted.

Update: Four days after this column was published, NPR changed its policy. According to a July 2 memo from Sara Goo, an NPR managing editor who oversees digital content, to the newsroom, "opinion content published on NPR.org must now include 'Opinion:' as the first word of the headline."

The Radio Television Digital News Association announced today the 2018 National Edward R. Murrow Award recipients and NPR earned five awards, the most honors of any news outlet this year.

• In the Radio Network category, NPR and National Correspondent John Burnett were recognized for continuing coverage and reporting of immigration stories.