The "New York Times" contains a catch-up story today about 20 executive at Goldman Sachs -- "still stinging from bad publicity" --- having interviewed Richard "Jake" Siewert Jr. over the course of several months for the chief communications job that's been held by Lucas van Praag, "a smooth-talking Briton," since 2000. He had been named a partner at the firm in 2006 -- a rarified position for a PR guy.

"Is it just like in the movie?" "Bloomberg's Businessweek" asks, then provides a gallery of "exclusive" pictures from inside Facebook headquarters that confirms that it's pretty much like what you've probably imagined. The penultimate photograph is an ostrich-like stuffed bird astride a stuffed panda bear on a desktop -- an apt analogy, perhaps, of what would have seemed like a very unlikely coupling less than a decade ago: a bunch of 20-something kids hiring Morgan Stanley to underwrite an IPO to raise upwards of $5 billion for a "social network" that was dreamed up in a dorm room.

So who is this Brit who has been hired to run what has arguably been the most innovative retail start-up in recent memory? John Browett, 48, was named yesterday to succeed the much-lauded Ron Johnson, who now heads J.C. Penney, as the company's SVP/retail.

Store brands are coming after brand marketers' Boar's Head meat and Idaho potatoes: the inferred promise of higher quality. Hannah Karp has a fact- and anecdote-rich piece about the accelerating trend in the "Wall Street Journal" this morning.

You know price resistance is palpable when Procter & Gamble, for all its analysis of the consumer's psyche, can't pull off a 9% increase on a product that only the most ardent shoppers remember what they paid the last time they were in the aisles.

It took a whistleblower lawsuit and the deaths of five patients but all of a sudden everyone with a constituency seems to be outraged by the 1-800 -GET-THIN freeway billboards, bus ads and radio and TV spots that have permeated the Los Angeles market in recent years. It's a story that the "Los Angeles Times," particularly columnist Michal Hiltzik, has been pursuing for years.

McDonald's posted its eighth straight year of positive sales around the globe and, while it is concerned about rising prices and the impact on franchisees, it expects the trend to continue, Maureen Morrison reports in "Ad Age." It plans to open 1,300 outlets, including 250 in China, and to renovate about 2,400 restaurants in the coming year. It's also presumably rethinking its social media strategy following what the "Financial Times" describes as a "hijacking" of a Twitter campaign last week.

What golf advertising needs, according the Callaway creative director Justin Timberlake -- yes, that Justin Timberlake -- is a "nice injection of kickassery." Presumably, that's exactly what the new campaign he has fashioned with Denver's Factory Design Labs brings to the fairway as it breaks during the Farmers Insurance Open (how's that for a kickassery-type of corporate sponsor?) this weekend.

Blackberry parent company Research in Motion "is "bowing to critics and market forces," as the New York Times headline puts it, by replacing the co- CEOs who developed "the innovative device that was the first to reliably deliver email over airwaves." Thorsten Heins, who joined RIM in 2007 and most recently has been COO for software, hardware and sales, becomes CEO effective today. Mike Lazaridis, who co-founded RIM with a childhood friend in 1985, becomes vice chairman and will lead an "innovation committee," Ian Austen reports. Jim Balsillie, who invested $250,000 in the company in 1992, remains a director and …

The young pups of the internet have a few tricks to teach the old dogs of the Internet if this week's grassroots campaign against the pending Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA in the House) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA in the Senate) are any indication of how to rapidly mobilize a movement against entrenched -- a.k.a., well-funded-- interests.