• The least a news anchor should know is what's breaking right under his nose. But Brian Williams was caught off guard when, earlier this week, NBC News hired former Newsweek editor Mark Whitaker to be senior vice president for news, making him the No. 2 official in the network's news division. An NBC source says Williams found out about the hire from an internal memo, like everyone else. Maybe he was too busy cleaning out his office to keep up with the watercooler gossip?

• Nora Ephron feels bad about her neck, but at least she feels good about ... well, actually, there doesn't seem to be much she feels good about. "This insistence on the joy of aging, the joy of menopause, the joy of late-life sex—this is all garbage," the When Harry Met Sally screenwriter tells Deborah Solomon in the New York Times Magazine. "It's hard to think of much that is genuinely better." Asked what she's done to counteract the effects of age on her face, Ephron says, "I've had Restylane injections, only it wasn't called Restylane; it was called something else. It doesn't hurt that much. It hurts less than having fat injected into your face, which I've also had done. That hurts big time, although not as much as labor."

• The Hollywood Reporter isn't what it used to be, but there's still plenty of interest in the trade paper's top editorial job, which has been open since Cynthia Littleton decamped to arch-rival Variety in March. A number of Los Angeles Times staffers are said to have thrown their hats into the ring, perhaps worried about what might become of the Times now that it (and parent Tribune Co.) have been taken over by Sam Zell. (One, staff writer, Claudia Eller, says she was contacted by a search firm, not the other way around.) New York Times scribe Sharon Waxman's name has also come up. Asked whether she was in the running, Waxman says, "There's nothing going on there." (Intriguingly, she adds, "If that were true, I don't think I'd let you break it.") The job is said to pay around $200,000 a year. "If it were not for the money, no serious journalist would take it," says one embittered insider. "The new owners are only interested in using the paper to help promote their seminars and other profit-making enterprises."

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