Ease a case of the Mondays with this post, a retrospective of the most-shared April Fool's ad hoaxes of the past -- especially apt when the Fool's Day comes on a Sunday, when "companies have a smaller online audience for their practical jokes," writes Tim Nudd. We're partial to animals,  so of course we liked the doggie highchair and the Google animalspeak translation app the best.

A group of the Philadelphia area's "most powerful business and political leaders" -- including George E. Norcross III, "a Democratic powerbroker in South New Jersey" -- just bought the Philadelphia Media Network for $55 million, writes Amy Chozick. The company publishes the Inquirer, The Daily News and Philly.com. The new owners said that "they had agreed to sign a pledge drafted by 300 newsroom employees concerned about potential interference," writes Chozick.

Oprah Winfrey's cable channel, OWN, signed a distribution deal with Comcast Corp. that raised the number of subscribers who can watch OWN on the cable operator, and also assured that Comcast will begin paying carriage fees for the channel starting in 2013 -- charges it currently does not pay. This is good news for the struggling network, which "didn't initially earn subscription revenue from its distributors when it went on air early last year, people close to the channel said," writes Sam Schechner and Christopher S. Stewart.

Bloomberg and Thompson Reuters are flourishing in an age when other news organizations are floundering because "both have financial services at their center," writes Lucia Moses. "News is a core part of their offerings, but it is their subscription-based businesses and financial intelligence that contribute the bulk of their revenue..." That financial base, while it allows both companies to hire "A-list journalists" -- and consider acquiring the likes of TheNew York Times (Bloomberg) and The Financial Times (Reuters) -- also raises "some thorny questions about the future of journalism," according to Moses. For one: each companies news content "is …

In the new age of magazine publishing, when pubs have branched out into Web sites, TV shows, apps -- and in the case of Bon Appetit, a cookware line -- a magazine's editor in chief has become like a "content brand officer," writes John Koblin. In a well-balanced feature, Koblin presents an assorted group of of editors and publishing execs commenting on this trend. Many editors seem to relish this expansion of duties, but The New Yorker's David Remnick and Vanity Fair's Graydon Carter are less posiitve about what GQ editor in chief Jim Nelson calls "the cult of the …