A news brief we happened across today:

We're not one of the three people nationwide who watch MSNBC, so we have no idea if this is new or not. But this tip just came in, and the female emailer was so excited she prefaced the news with at least two exclamation points and an OMG:

• Judy Miller is "having the time of her life," says hubby Jason Epstein, and so is he, it would seem. [WWD]
• Also, Miller appreciates your letters but doesn't want your used books. [Media Mob/NYO]
• Coming in your Times Mag: soldier sex in Iraq. Hot. [E&P]
• From the home office in Melville, Long Island: Top ten reasons we'll always have network anchors. [Newsday]
• More bad news for newspapers: First Craig steals the classifieds, now Hollywood's giving up on splashy movie ads, according to Nikki Finke. [LA Weekly]

• Back from imaginary Thanksgiving with the Murdochs, Simon Dumenco is drafting imaginary decency memos at the FCC. [Ad Age]
• Hey guess what? The kids like the cable networks' late-night fare, like Jon Stewart and Family Guy. And advertisers like to go where the viewers are. [LAT]
• The Bancroft family controls Dow Jones & Co., which publishes The Wall Street Journal. But the way they've been selling their stock, the family might not for much longer. [NYP]
• The newest New Yorker writer: Former WP managing editor Steve Coll. [NYT]
• Thanks to the new Wallpaper*, you can peek inside Rupert Murdoch's fridge. [WWD]
• David Carr remakes that Observer classic, "When Rupert met Hillary..." [NYT]
• Dan Rather liked Peter Jennings, too. [NY Mag]
• For foreign-policy types, sexy pictures in the new Playboy. [Media Mob/NYO]

It's just a Nexis dump, but it's perhaps the best Nexis dump we've read. The Observer's Rebecca Dana looks at Peter Jennings as a New Yorker — he called the city to register a complaint about Al Gore's campaign closing part of Central Park, he volunteered with the Coalition for the Homeless, he wished there were better restaurants on the Upper West Side — and she collates the best moments of that New Yorker's September 11 coverage:

A headline from Publishers Weekly:

It is remarkable for those of us who were children in the 1970s and '80s, who have virtually no memory of a time before Peter, Tom, and Dan were the network anchors, that the three men, who just a year ago seemed a fixed part of the landscape, always there when you looked for them, even if you didn't look for them often, that today none remains in the job.

When they told us Robert Novak had screamed "bullshit!" and stormed off a CNN set, we weren't particularly surprised.

The L magazine is out with its oddly punctuated "Best! (and Worst) of NYC" double issue. The results come from a reader poll, and we disagree with almost all of it, from their sexiest newscaster (Matt Lauer? Please. Hasn't Pat Kiernan ever read the L folks the paper?) to their best tree-lined block (a host of cute West Village blocks kick Jane's puny ass, beginning with Bank and Commerce) to their best burger (um, guys, if you like Jane Street so much, can we point you to a bistro on its corner?). And let's not even get started on their taste in NYC blogs.

Just wanted to let you know that, no, we haven't forgotten about Aaron Brown's iPod and its secret John Denver song. Thing is, we're actually trying to find out the answer. We've emailed Brown himself a few times, we've spoken with CNN's top New York publicist, who promised she'd look into it, and we're waiting to hear back.

CNN anchor Aaron Brown submits to a Q&A in the current issue of Golf Connoisseur, a quarterly lifestyle mag for the country-club set. He talks about what's in his hair, his bookcase, his basement, his nightmares, and, most interestingly, his iPod.