In your coincidental Wednesday media column: James Murdoch gets a promotion, digital media is a strange business, NBC News misplaced its GE story, Starbucks and Morning Joe will never separate, and the NYO is photogenic.

  • News Corp has named Rupert Murdoch's son James as the company's new COO, and chairman and CEO of its international operations. What are the odds, the boss's son achieving such a high rank in the same company as his dad? And not long after his sister sold her own company to dear old dad for hundred of millions of dollars! Must be astronomical odds. It's almost as if News Corp isn't a public company at all, right? Weird.
  • Funny thing about this list of the 50 "most successful digital media companies" in Paid Content: you have to go all the way down to number six (IAC) before you hit what is traditionally thought of as a "digital media" company. Media is a niche business!
  • NBC News didn't do a story on the widely reported fact that GE got off without paying any taxes last year, and there's lots of hint-hinting that they buried the story due to the fact that GE's their parent company. Yea, probably.
  • Starbucks has re-upped its sponsorship deal with MSNBC's Morning Joe, ensuring that America never sees Joe Scarborough's smug face without a big product placement next to it, to remind us he's not as great as he thinks he is.
  • Among the changes at the new and improved New York Observer: more photos of the boss's wife.

[Photo via Getty]