To kill off Charlie Sheen's chances to ever return to "Two And A Half Men," the producers plan to have his character, Charlie Harper, meet a tragic death on the first episode of the new season, sources tell TMZ. R.I.P., womanizing jerk -- of course we mean Harper, not Sheen.

"Survivor" host Jeff Probst will be taking on topics similar to those as on the iconic Oprah show when he begins hosting a one-hour daytime CBS talk show next year. Probst, who has been subbing for Regis Philbin on "Live with Regis and Kelly," gives up his chance to replace another talk-show icon -- Philbin -- by taking part in the competition to carve up Oprah's daytime audience instead.

The news that Meredith Corp. just bought the food/nutrition magazine Eating Well has been the occasion for some analysis of Meredith, which of course recently axed another pub, ReadyMade. Here's some back story on Eating Well, which was born in 1990, and has "has had to endure an awful lot of setbacks," we wrote previously in a positive review of the pub. "Born in a small Vermont town, the mag was bought by Hachette Filipacchi after several years, then deep-sixed in 1999. A group of original founders brought it back in 2002, after watching their baby 'run by international publishing …

"Here's yet another reason to kill the set-top box as we know it: The boxes consumers use to control their cable TV subscriptions and record shows to their DVRs are incredibly wasteful," writes Gigaom's Ryan Lawler. In fact, he adds, a recent study by the Natural Resources Defense Council tabulates annual cost in energy bills to U.S. residents at more than $3 billion. Those costs mount even when no one's actually watching TV two-thirds of the time, which is of course an environmental no-no.

"We've been through some shit times... But things are pretty good," notes Time Out founder Tony Elliott on his international magazine and book empire, much of which he's recently signed over to London-based private equity firm Oakley Capital. He sits down with Adweek's Lucia Moses for a long interview, complete with analysis of how "the Web caught Elliott flat-footed."

The Washington Post's iPad app, introduced last November, was reportedly going to be fee-based after February, but is still free -- why? Poynter's Jeff Sonderman speculates on the reasoning behind the decision. For one, the newspaper "could be waiting to see if others make paid content work on the iPad."

Once again, the difference between more traditional and online journalism is at issue -- this time regarding Amazon's oh-so-influential customer reviews of products and books. According to a new study, Amazon has an army of unpaid citizen-reviewers, many of whom receive free products. "Why is that an issue?" asks Paid Content's Laura Hazard Owen. "Professional critics -- at a publication like the New York Times --also receive free books to review, of course. But those critics are paid by the publications they write for, and their job is to review these books objectively. For Amazon's unpaid customer reviewers, the …

An ad placed last year on the Minneapolis Star-Tribune's Web site led to an FBI indictment against two Latvians this week as the agency cracked an international cybercrime case. The alleged hackers had spread "scareware" via ads on other news sites as well, writes James Walsh, although no other sites were named in either his story or in the official FBI press release  about the case. The South Florida Business Journal, meanwhile, focuses on its own local twist -- an alleged buyer named Lisa Polowski from a nonexistent Miami ad agency, called RevolTech Marketing, who sent an email …

Five-time Emmy winner Peter Falk died Thursday at the age of 83. Falk was best known for the iconic role of police Lieutenant Columbo in the eponymous series that ran from 1971 on and off through 2003. The rumpled-looking Columbo, always a blue-collar thorn in the side of usually wealthy, imperious murderers, could arguably be the forerunner of a slew of eccentric TV detectives, from the OCD-threatened Adrian Monk to the chocolate-eating Southern firecracker Brenda on "The Closer."

NBC's brand-new iPad app has a lot of great stuff, but where are the full-length NBC shows? After all, says Ryan Lawler, such episodes are available on NBC.com and Hulu, not to mention on iPad apps from Netflix and Hulu Plus. While the latter two are subscription services, he says that NBC could monetize its own iPad app showing via ad revenues.