In May, Noah Oppenheim left the Today show, where he was pulling double duty while also manning David Gregory's Race to the White House, for Reveille, the production studio that Ben Silverman just unloaded. Now, Oppenheim's replacement arrives. Today EP Jim Bell alerted staffers via email last night that Noah Kotch is taking his place, arriving from ABC News. Today was his first day.

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This morning, the Today show kicked off its Beijing Olympics coverage, though it's unclear whether this counts toward NBC Universal's 3,600 hours of Games coverage (we're guessing no). Matt Lauer is over there talking about the Great Wall while other NBC types are giving us a tour of the city's $43 billion facelift. Perfect timing, then, for a LAT profile of Jim Bell, Today's executive producer who has to find the right mix of creampuff stories about Olympics competitors and China's ignoring the promises it made to get the 2008 Games there. (So far, Today has done an adamant job of not reporting on China's pollution problem.)

But we're not just seeing an explanation of how 30 Rock is going to handle reporting from Beijing (while parent company GE does billions in business with China) — we're seeing a very carefully orchestrated plan to mold Bell into the inevitable leader of NBC Sports.

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NBC News very cleverly gave Phil Griffin a new job description yesterday. Previously the SVP of NBC News, Griffin has been running the day-to-day at MSNBC since 2006, following Rick Kaplan's departure. In his new role, as president of MSNBC, Griffin will be, uh, running the day-to-day at MSNBC. Indeed, nothing has really changed about his role at the cable channel. Elsewhere? Yeah, things are different.

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