For four days, the Meta teen-settlement story has been a price ticker. We counted the tape: $16.68 billion at Reuters, $17 billion at AP by lunch, $18 billion by dinner, $17.1 billion once NPR read the fine print. The number wobbled; the coverage chased it. What almost nobody headlined was the question an actual parent would ask: what does this thing do? This morning NPR got there — "Lights out, Instagram off? The changes to Meta for teens could be a big deal" — and it's the most useful piece of journalism this settlement has produced. This is a praise piece. Mostly. * Here's what doing it right looks like. Rhitu Chatterjee's piece walks the terms like a lease: a default two-hour daily limit for under-18s that only a parent can lift. A nighttime use block. Notifications off overnight and during school hours. A ban on showing minors their like counts. A ban on cosmetic-procedure filters. A 90%-of-reports-answered-within-six-hours commitment, age verification, an independent auditor — each item traceable to the settlement's actual text via the California AG's release. That's the product. It took four days for the product to out-headline the price, and public radio got there first. * Better still, the piece keeps its skepticism in frame. It quotes a researcher's evidence for why the changes might work — "about 50% of kids are reporting at least one symptom of clinical dependency on social media" — and then immediately shows why they might not: Instagram's own 'Take a Break' feature, as Adam Mosseri testified in court, "wasn't as effective as they had hoped." One expert asks for the changes to be "rigorously evaluated," and the piece itself flags that teens "can and do lie about their age." Meta's denial of the allegations is stated, twice. Applause-with-footnotes is exactly the register this story needs. * Now the footnotes to our applause. First, the clocks. NPR's web piece says the nighttime block runs "from midnight to 6 a.m." NPR's own radio segment — transcribed on the same page — says "between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m." Those are different curfews, two hours apart, in one article. After a week in which the fine itself wore four different price tags, the curfew now has two start times, and both of them are NPR's. Somebody check the settlement PDF and pick one. * Second, watch a single contract clause change mood between newsrooms. CNN, on day two, described the conditional chunk like a penalty: Meta "will pay out only 70%" of the total "unless TikTok and YouTube agree to pay around $6 billion each." NPR today describes the same arrangement like a bonus: Meta "has negotiated that $5 billion of the settlement will be paid to states if other companies join the effort." Same clause. In one telling, Meta wriggles out of 30% unless its rivals pay up; in the other, the states stand to gain an extra $5 billion. Neither is false. But 'discount' and 'donation' are different stories, and each outlet picked its default without telling you there was a choice. * Still: the week's arc, honestly graded, ends better than it started. The settlement began as a bidding war between headlines that couldn't agree on a number. It ends with an outlet listing what changes in a 15-year-old's pocket at midnight — or 10 p.m., pending clarification — and asking scientists whether any of it will work. That's the job. The price was never the story. The feed was.