CNNMoney.com published a list of the 15 most stressful, least paying jobs, according to a survey by Payscale.com. News reporter is No. 4.

Are you adding to that stress, or helping alleviate it?

By the way, PR professional did not make the list.

Details magazines has a somewhat ridiculous story in its November issue about “Cougar Con,” a singles event that brought together young men and single women over 40, or “cougars,” a once slanderous term that has since become popular enough to inspire TV shows on cable networks and ABC.

The article points out that this event wasn’t at all a conference, but instead one of countless events for single people hosted by a man named Rich Grosse. Thing is these events never got any attention—until the organizer added the word “cougar” to the press release. I’ll let Details take it from here.

Rich Gosse has organized events for the Society of Single Professionals for 30 years. He ran for governor of California in 2003 on a "fairness for singles" platform. To promote this Friday-night matchmaking party in Palo Alto, he replaced "singles" and "mixer" with "cougar" and "convention" in the press release. For good measure, he threw in "first annual." Soon he was fielding calls from England and Finland. More than 40 members of the media phoned him too, including a correspondent from Al Gore's Current TV. "We've been doing parties with younger men and older women, and no one knew we existed," Gosse says. "We say 'cougar,' and now we have media from all over the world."

Like I said, a ridiculous story—about our ridiculous media.

UPDATE APPENDED AND INCLUDED IN BODY OF STORY

Guess where 40 percent of Web traffic went each month in the third quarter of 2009?

I'll give a second to consider it ...

Give up?

The answer is newspaper Web sites.

“An average 74 million people visited a newspaper Web site each month in the third quarter of 2009, equaling just under 40 percent of all active U.S. Internet users,” MediaPost’s Erik Sass reported. The data, Sass said, comes from the Newspaper Association of America, which cited researched by Nielsen Online.

UPDATE: A reader pointed out in the comments section that my claim in the opening sentence is incorrect. The commenter said, "The number of visitors to newspaper sites equals 40% of the known internet connections in the US. That DOES NOT EQUAL 40% of all web traffic!" (You can find the rest of his comment, including his opinion of my editorial judgment, in the comments section below.)

This marks the highest number of visitors in a quarter, since Nielsen began tracking this information in 2004. MediaPost noted that this milestone is especially encouraging for newspapers, because this was an off-year, meaning there were no big news events like the Olympics or a presidential election.

UPDATE: Online readership may have flourished in the third quarter, but overall sales of hard copy newspapers dropped sharply. Newspaper circulation fell 10 percent, between Jan. 1 and Sept. 30, compared to the same time last year, according to The New York Times.

A majority of Americans see bankers more as Mr. Potters than George Baileys. (You know, from It's A Wonderful Life.)

“Nearly three-quarters (74 percent) of people surveyed agree with this statement: ‘The greed and risky decisions of banks and financial companies led to the financial crisis and recession,’ according to research by Benenson Strategy Group,” as reported by the Chicago Sun-Times.

The survey was released Wednesday before the start of the American Bankers Association conference in Chicago this weekend.

Here’s my suggestion to help clean up their image: The Bankers Association should launch a social media campaign called The ForeClosure Challenge. Five of the most social media savvy bankers (probably an oxy-moron, I know) will suffer foreclosure and then share their experiences via Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, Facebook and the blog on TheForeClosureChallenge.com.

Just a thought.

Enjoy the music. (Theme song for the conference, maybe?)

Thanks to the TV show “Mad Men,” you’ve seen (or at least heard) about the heavy drinking that advertising men did in the 1960s. And, a couple weeks back, the Web site Big Think interviewed iconic journalist Gay Talese, who talked about the hard-drinking journalists of the ‘60s.

But what about PR pros? Were they a bunch of teetotalers in the ‘60s? Not quite, according to The New Yorker’s Calvin Trillin.

In a video interview with Big Think, Trillin recounted the “three or four” martini lunch he had with a friend and PR pro in the 1960s. The reason for the lunch? The PR man wanted to give him a press release he’d just written.

So there’s a tip for today: Want to get a reporter’s attention. Take him out for mid-day drinks, and then hope he remembers the whole thing.

The Bank of America Theater in Chicago, which stages the hit musical Jersey Boys, was evacuated late Tuesday after a bomb scare, the Chicago Tribune reports.

Two suspicious boxes were spotted behind the theater. No explosives were found inside of them. On each box was a note. One note said, “This is not going to end good.”

Clearly, the Chicago police are dealing with an English major.

The incident did end well. No one was hurt. Unfortunately, theatergoers Tuesday didn’t get a chance to find out how the Jersey Boys ends. (One of them dies.)

Sorry, spoiler alert.

Of course, the lesson here, besides don't plant fake bombs, is that verbs require adverbs, not adjectives. The note said "end good." The verb is "to end"; it requires the adverb "well."

Here's the Schoolhouse Rock! explanation:

Wisconsin, you blew it.

The Associated Press reports that your Wisconsin Tourism Federation — WTF — quietly rebranded in July, changing its name to the Tourism Federation of Wisconsin — TFW.

Get it? WTF to TFW.

So, what prompted this rebranding? After all, Wisconsin’s WTF was around well before teens, and later adults, started saying WTF to mean “what the f*ck.”

“Blogs started poking fun at it,” the Association Press reported.

Because blogs started poking fun at it? Really? One blog, it seems, made fun of it. That blog is called YourLogoMakesMeBarf.com. On July 1, the blog posted the Tourism Federation’s logo with this comment, “would really think someone would warn them about this kind of stuff.”

Ouch. Better call up the PR SWAT team for that one.

Other blogs and articles are claiming the people of Wisconsin cracked wise about the acronym endlessly, and the Tourism Federation of Wisconsin, a group of businesses in the state, finally got sick of it. Clearly, the blog YourLogoMakesMeBarf.com played a strong hand in the decision, given the timing.

It was a big mistake. This organization had a marketing goldmine. Wisconsin’s “WTF” was branded in 1979. So, WTF, optimize it! Next time someone types WTF into Google, there’s your site. Someone types WTF into a Facebook update or Gmail e-mail and an ad for Wisconsin appears.

And make light of the silly acronym, don’t run from it. Someone Googles “WTF” and finds the Wisconsin Tourism Federation site, here’s some sample text that could accompany it:

WTF? That’s probably what you’re asking? What the fu—OK, we’ll stop you right there. Here’s why you’ve landed on a Web site dedicated to Wisconsin. WTF are the initials for the Wisconsin Tourism Federation. We were here before WTF meant something else, and we’ll be here after it evolves into something like WTFF (think about that for second).

•Our great sense of humor — just look at this ad!
•[Reason]
•[Reason]
•[Reason]

It surprises me that the people of Wisconsin, who always seemed fun-loving, would take exception to the acronym. Or, as Jonathan Turley, a legal blogger and fellow Chicagoan, wrote, “What I fail to understand (admittedly with a Chicago bias) is why people who wear cheese on their heads at football games are this sensitive about being called WTF.”

Turns out one of my Ragan co-workers grew up in Wisconsin. I asked her about it: Did you know about WTF? Is this something that bothers you? Should they have changed it?

Here’s what she said:

“Never heard of it. Never even heard any one talk about it. I think it’s dumb. Only in Wisconsin would this happen. And I’m from Wisconsin, so I can say that.”

The state has spoken.

Ever heard of Twitteleh? It’s a new service for communicating with your Jewish mother in just 140 characters. All you have to do is answer these three questions:

1. Where are you?
2. What have you eaten?
3. Are you wearing a sweater?

The service, explained in this two-minute video, is a gag — obviously. And I don’t think this is exclusive to Jewish mothers. My mom would be thrilled to hear the answers to those questions, plus at least two more:

4. When’s the last time you talked to your brother?
5. When will your father and I see you again?

The answers to those questions are “yesterday” and “whenever you and dad can make time in your busy schedules,” every time.