• NYC Board of Health: Bans trans fats. [Daily Intel]
• 24-Hr French News Network: To launch Wednesday. [BusinessWeek]
• NBC’s Today: Tops Nielsen ratings for 11th consecutive year. [TVNewser]
• Yoko Ono: Runs full page ad in Times on anniversary of John Lennon’s death. [Gothamist]
• Pulitzers: May honor photog for 1979 shot. [AP via E&P]
• Scientific American: Experiments with wiki-reporting. [CJR Daily]
• Damon Wayans: Fined $20 for each N-Word use at Laugh Factory. [Jossip]
  

And then, there were 30:

New York, NY (December 6, 2006) — Veronica Smiley has been named the Vice President of Marketing for Radar Magazine and Radar Online (www.radaronline.com).

Smiley appears to have had no magazine-side experience, having spent the last several years with Procter & Gamble. No matter for Maer, though — he’s just hoping Condé Nast keeps their plucking claws off this time.

Diddy gets puffy

Steve Bloom, High Times editor-at-large, sometime mediabistro.com contributor and manager of the magazine’s infamous softball team, has launched celebstoner.com, a Web site with as straightforward a mission as Snakes On A Plane. Bloom and co. do get a bit of a stonerriffic coup: shots of Diddy [above]getting puffy at an Erick Morello show at the Docks.

Bloom, you’ll recall, helped us publish the first photos of Willie Nelson’s pot bush stash. In other words, if there was a Pulitzer for pot, Bloom would be on our shortlist.

Well, here’s a shocker: Perez Hilton, both the friend and foe of celebutantes and Us Weekly editors everywhere, was asked to appear at VH1′s Big In ’06 Awards show. The paparazzi, many of whom are pissed at Perez for the unauthorized posting of photos, refused to snap his photo on the red carpet. (Imagine that: a blogger snubbed by paparazzi at an awards show. Crazy.)

Meanwhile, Hilton has a refreshing-if-cocky take on the PR establishment, and said so to PRWeek:

PRWeek: What kind of treatment do you get from the entertainment establishment?

Hilton: It depends. I think and hope most of them enjoy it and get a kick out of it, and find it entertaining and informational. Some may not. Some may find me threatening because I speak the truth. I sometimes render publicists useless. Before, publicists could do damage control and spin things and use their tricks to make sure that information that got out was information they wanted to get out, and it got out the way they wanted it to. And that’s not necessarily the case anymore. Now they can’t threaten me and they don’t have any control over me. I’m kind of like this renegade doing my own thing. But I think now they have resigned themselves to my existence. If I was a celebrity weekly, a publicist would be like: If you continue to write this about my client then I’m going to cut off all my other clients and none of them will talk to you. But now, I can say “I don’t care because I don’t need access to your clients.”

EARLIER:

Officials in Santa Lucia del Camino, Oaxaca, Mexico have released security officers Abel Santiago Zárate and Orlando Manuel Aguilar Coello, the two suspects arrested in the killing of Indymedia cameraman Brad Will during a protest against Oaxaca’s governor on October 27. They were released December 1 after a month in custody, according to the daily newspaper La Jornada.

Reporters Without Borders, the press freedom organization, suspects a cover-up: “Everything suggests that the Oaxaca state judicial authorities are now trying to cover up for Governor Ulíses Ruiz Ortiz’s aides.”

EARLIER:

Washingtonienne Jessica Cutler was supposed to appear at a mediabistro.com panel next Monday, December 11 (From Blogger to Author: How Bloggers Get Book Deals, and What This Means for Publishing). But she blew it off after she remembered she was being sued. And that she had moved to Florida. (How do you forget where you live?) She didn’t feel too bad about bailing, though, when she also remembered she wasn’t being paid. Still, we’re shocked — shocked — that someone known for exchanging sex for money would behave this way. Now that Michael Malice and Rachel Kramer Bussel are on the bill, Jessica almost wants to come. But we’re still not paying her.

Slate‘s Timothy Noah says this sentence, in a story by Holli Chmela about the Kennedy Center Honors, is “the single stupidest to appear in that newspaper since I began reading it more than three decades ago”:

Mr. Lloyd Webber is often referred to as the Shakespeare of his time with musicals like Jesus Christ Superstar, Evita, Cats, and The Phantom of the Opera.

Noah says it is riddled by an “apples-and-oranges problem” (William Shakespeare being a playwright, Andrew Lloyd Webber a composer) and that Chmela’s “often” declaration proves troublesome for someone, like Noah, who knows his way around Lexis Nexis.

We’ll set aside our aesthetic differences with Noah’s piece (we would’ve gone with a less ambiguous headline than Breakdown at the New York Times) to focus on Noah’s “single stupidest in three decades” claim. Surely, Noah hasn’t read every sentence in those three decades — an assumption that Noah would’ve surely nailed Chmela for, too. And, based on our own Times skimming over the last decade, chances are the honor would’ve gone to the sports section.

EARLIER:

EARLIER:

Another day, another set of tiring media stories about how Katie Couric and Meredith Vieira are settling into their respective new desk chairs.

Via Howard Kurtz in the Washington Post:

The critics — and Katie Couric has more than her share — may not have noticed, but the nightly newscast that she launched three months ago is in transition. Some of the changes she made have been dropped or curtailed to squeeze in more old-fashioned, what-happened-today stories. And Couric is finally starting to make news for covering the news.

Vieira’s “settling in” though, has been “seamless“:

NBC News, which prides itself on smooth talent transitions, seems to have achieved it on the “Today” show, where Vieira slipped in beside Matt Lauer in September without roiling the morning show audience. “It has been too smooth,” said Jim Bell, “Today” executive producer. “It has been too good. As great a story as it has been for us, it has just been seamless and that may be why it hasn’t drawn as much attention.