This release from the Globe speaks for itself. This ain't good, folks. When I called the 888 number at the bottom of the release to check on my status, I was told that the paper would be getting back to folks affected by this in the next 48 hours.

BOSTON, Jan. 31, 2006 – The Boston Globe and Worcester Telegram & Gazette are notifying their home-delivery subscribers who pay by credit or bank card that some customers’ confidential credit card numbers were inadvertently printed on the backs of routing slips attached to newspaper bundles that were sent to retailers and newspaper carriers in the Worcester area this past weekend.

The Shorenstein Center at Harvard has just announced the finalists for its annual $25,000 Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting as well as a special citation for New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof. I was one of five judges for this year's contest who examined almost 140 entries. And I can attest to the fact that it was a hell of a field.

For those paying close attention, the news that Clean Power Now -- a group that supports the controversial wind farm project in Nantucket Sound -- has hired Jack Coleman as a media consultant isn't too surprising. But it's part of an interesting story.

Coleman had covered the wind farm story at the Cape Cod Times, a paper that had become known for its staunch and relentless opposition to the wind farm, primarily on its editorial pages.

There's only one good guy in this whole wildly overblown Oprah/James Frey contretemps over "A Million Little Pieces." (Last night, I made the rounds of the cable news shows hoping for some enlightenment on the stunning Palestinian election results. Silly me. I should have known that Oprah's belated apology and public spanking of her former teacher's pet takes precedence over a momentous geopolitical earthquake.

This excerpt from the media watchdog website CJR Daily illustrates why, with every passing day she spends on "Today," Katie Couric makes the potential transition to CBS Evening News anchor more unlikely and harder to sell. (Hint: however she did on the Abramoff scandal, it's the last paragraph -- which I bolded -- that's the damning one.

It's not the same thing as reporting that most of the Sago Mine disaster victims had been found alive. And it's not Dewey beats Truman. But U.S. newspapers again found themselves in another one of those frustrating deadline traps today in trying to report on the Palestinian elections -- which appear to have led to a stunning Hamas triumph.

I'm not a conspiracy buff, but three is positively a trend. In rapid succession, CNN has just hired conservative talkmaster Glenn Beck (for Headline News), former Republican Congressman J.C. Watts, and worst of all, that moralizing pompous gasbag (ask me how I really feel) William Bennett.

Jeez, Louise. I know the Fox News Channel is kicking CNN's butt in the ratings, but Roger Ailes has already got the Republican base locked up.

It seems that by appointing Paula Kerger as its new president to succeed Pat Mitchell, PBS has settled on an insider to steer its ship through troubled waters.

This statement from one of my favorite and most quotable media analysts, Jeff Chester, the executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy , suggests that the only person facing a more difficult challenge than Kerger will be the new prime minister of Iraq:

This quote on the Boston TV News website indicates that Channel 56 (WLVI-TV) will keep its late newscast intact despite the fact that it is going to be the new CW station in Boston after yesterday's switcheroo.

A SENIOR WLVI SOURCE TELLS BTVN: "[This is] a great story for WLVI. We end up with a stronger network, stronger programming, a better news lead-in and one less competitor in town.

Here's the deal on what the new CW network (the old UPN and WB) will mean in Boston. Tribune-owned WLVI-TV (Channel 56), which was a WB affiliate, will become a CW affiliate. WSBK-TV (Channel 38), which is part of the CBS-owned Boston duopoly and was a UPN affiliate, will now become an independent station with 10 hours of priime-time programming to fill and a lot of options.

Okay, this isn't as bad as it sounds. (Or as good, depending on your point of view.) The Wisconsin State Journal isn't quite selling off its front page to popular tastes by letting readers vote for the story they'd most like to read on page 1 the next day. For example: here are the choices for tomorrow's paper:

Vote for the story you'd most like to read in tomorrow's Wisconsin State Journal.