Wall Street Journal

—Lonely Planet : Lonely Planet, the travel brand owned by BBC Worldwide, has hired Dow Jones' digital strategy and operations SVP Matthew Goldberg as its new CEO. He will replace Judy Slatyer. Goldberg had led the Wall Street Journal Digital Network's business operations, including those for WSJ.com, MarketWatch, Barrons.com and AllThingsDigital.com. When he starts with Lonely Planet in March, he will be charged with maintaining its core printed travel guides business and growing its digital and multiplatform opportunities.

The mystery of why deputy managing editor Adi Ignatius is leaving Time is solved: He's the new editor in chief of Harvard Business Review. The Boston-based title has been without a top editor since last summer, when Tom Stewart quietly resigned.

Did you hear? Laura Bush got an $8 million advance to write about life in the White House! Or maybe that's a $3.5 million advance. Or $1.6 million. Do I hear $1 million even?

In its initial report on the First Lady's deal with Scribner to publish a memoir in 2010, the Associated Press, citing no sources, guesstimated that the contract "would likely be worth at least as much as Hillary Clinton's $8 million for the memoir Living History."

Apple guru Steve Jobs finally went public about his heath yesterday, albeit with a characteristically gnomic disclosure that shed alarmingly little light on the subject. How to parse it? If you're a newspaper, of course, the answer is to find a single expert willing to speculate wildly.

Gannett (NYSE: GCI) flagship USA Today is the latest paper to be sold through Amazon's Kindle. The top-selling U.S. paper has yet to show up in the Kindle Store but Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) told Kindle subscribers on Christmas morning that they'll be able to download the Dec. 26 edition for free.

I recently celebrated a personal milestone of sorts: I acquired my 500th friend on Facebook.

Well, "celebrated" is the wrong word. These days, as this story in today's Wall Street Journal shows, the enviable thing is to have a trim Facebook network comprising only people one actually knows and likes; or, failing that, to have a strictly-regimented network with different tiers of access accurately reflecting degrees of real-world intimacy.

The Wall Street Journal weighs in today with its annual review of the year's best and worst ads. Some of its picks are obvious (eg. Burger King's awesome "Whopper Freakout" campaign) and some more controversial (will.i.am's pro-Obama "Yes We Can" video, which excited a lot of people but struck me as empty-headed and ripe for parody).

Here's three that didn't make the cut:

Reading through some clips in the wake of the news that Jim Brady is leaving WashingtonPost.com, I was struck by the rapid shift from separate but cooperating news operations to Russian nesting dolls following Katharine Weymouth's promotion to Washington Post (NYSE: WPO) publisher and CEO of the Media Group:

Mort Zuckerman has an important message for the world: I am still rich.

Zuckerman took to CNBC this afternoon to refute the belief, fostered by an imprecisely-worded Wall Street Journal story, that he lost a bundle in Bernard Madoff's now-notorious Ponzi scheme.

An article in today's Wall Street Journal accusing Google of betraying net neutrality principles has left many people scratching their heads. The article discusses Google's OpenEdge initiative, which the Journal described as placing Google services within Internet service providers' networks. Doing so would speed delivery of YouTube clips and other content.