In my blog post on my 10th anniversary at Ars, I promised to answer readers’ questions. This is one of my attempts to do so.

Quite a few people have asked me to go into more detail on the Ars editorial process—how do science news stories get chosen? So here’s a quick look at how the sausage gets made.

Everything starts the week or weekend before publication (depending on how organized I am). By Friday, Nature and PNAS have both put together lists of some of the stories they’ll be releasing the next week. Nature has its editors select some articles for full PR treatment, providing a several-paragraph summary that’s generally accurate. Others just have their titles listed; the majority aren’t released until the full edition of the journal appears online. PNAS also issues press releases for a few stories, but it also dumps the entire collection of articles. Science usually makes a list similar to Nature’s, and it’s available on Sunday night.