Wired magazine ponders whether Howard Stern might not have been better off switching to a podcast instead of satellite radio. After all, he said it wasn’t about the money, but rather the freedom to speak his mind. Of course, half a billion dollars is a pretty good incentive for going the second-best route.

What does the pharmaceutical industry need to do in order to rehabilitate its image, which could wind up ranking somewhere below tobacco companies? BusinessWeek explores the PR issues facing the pharma biz in the post-Vioxx and Celebrex era.

The Poughkeepsie Journal offers two articles on IBM—one dealing with employee blogs and the other with employee podcasts.

The Salt Lake Tribune offers up an intriguing piece about the use of blogs and podcasts to provide coverage of festivals. The item focuses on the Sundance Film Festival.

Richard Edelman focuses on the latest case of a PR agency paying for placement and calls for “CEOs of PR firms (tl) sign onto a code of proper behavior, that forbids payments to reporters, that mandates transparency on arrangements with third party experts and that bars a media company from having a licensed PR firm in the family.” Good idea, of course, but these scandals just keep happening.