Just to help anybody who may have Googled me by mistake, here’s the Washington Post short about the appointment of Mark Whitaker to replace Tim Russert as chief of the NBC News Washington bureau.

I’ve been aware of Mark’s career for a long time. He’s just a year younger than me, and we both started our journalism careers at the same time. I used to see his name listed in Newsweek as a researcher. Of course, he eventually became editor of that great magazine. I’ve been on different part of the news industry spectrum (notice I didn’t say lower!).

As to the number of T’s in our names, I’m told that in my family history there was a family split sometime, and one family member added a second T to separate himself from the rest of the family.

There’s another famous Mark Whitacre. He was the president of the Archer Daniels Midland BioProducts Division who, as an FBI informant, blew the whistle on a price-fixing scheme. He was a key witness in an anti-trust case, although he pleaded guilty to fraud and spent eight years in a federal prison.