"Some social nets like Pinterest seem to have been made for magazines," writes Steve Smith. "After all, the visual bookmarking site lets people pin images to its wall in much the same way generations of readers have been tearing and clipping pages of magazines for sharing and saving." So three women's mag's -- Real Simple, Better Homes and Gardens, and Martha Stewart  -- were among the top media practitioners praised by Pinterest. "Anecdotally we have heard from several magazines lately that Pinterest has become one of the strongest sources of social media traffic," writes  Smith.

Oh, how sad it is in Pasadena! From the p-o-v of one anonymous TV exec, the Television Critics Association press tour has degenerated into a hell peopled by such unfriendly types as "The Angry Young Blogger,"  "The Twit" (who cares only about tweeting) and "The Assasin," who "views himself or herself as an investigative reporter dedicated to the destruction of the evil empires that run the world and provide an inadequate breakfast."

While Showtime this week introduced a streaming app competitive to HBO Go, the third largest premium pay cable network, Starz, was missing in action on the "view-on-any-device" front, according to Daniel Frankel. Starz,  "the network that kick-started pay-cable’s entry into the streaming realm when it launched its Vongo movies-on-demand service and later cut a deal with Netflix.... now finds itself playing catch-up in the technological race it began," writes Frankel. The network's CEO, Chris Albrecht, said in November that "an 'authentication app' similar to HBO Go would be announced sometime in 2012," writes Frankel. No further word -- or timeline …

"I walk up to '2 Broke Girls' co-creator Michael Patrick King, offer my hand and say, 'Mr. King, I'm sorry things got so ugly there..." writes TV critic Alan Sepinwall in this fascinating look at what goes on in a Television Critics Association panel. Sepinwall was apologizing for his -- and fellow critics -- asking some hard questions of King for the show's alleged "racism" and "raunchiness." King got very defensive, and "things went horribly, horribly awry," writes Sepinwall.

Wenner Media will have a new Chief Digital Officer Jan. 20:  David Kang, Hearst’s creative director of content extensions for less than a year. The digital position has been open since November, when  Michael Bloom left after six months on the job. “Wenner Media’s digital strategy has been more cautious than those of its competitors,” writes Laura Hazard Owen, but the publisher is finally developing iPad versions of Rolling Stone and Us Weekly.

In what is presumably a first, ABC will debut two full episodes of its new series “The River” in movie theaters later this month – first in Los Angeles, then in New York, Philadelphia, and Austin, Texas cinemas.  The official TV premiere will be Feb. 7. “We love the idea and we think that the benefits of making the show available to more viewers outweigh the impact it might have on ratings for the show,” Paul Lee, president of ABC Entertainment, told critics at the Television Critics Association press tour.

Maybe Glamour's Cindi Leive? That's the only real candidate for the Vogue editorship Lucia Moses mentions in her rundown of possible candidates for the three most prestigious Conde Nast jobs. The others (Vanity Fair's and The New Yorker's editorial chiefdoms, held respectively by Graydon Carter and David Remnick) get two prospects apiece. Is it that hard to fill Wintour's Louboutins? Moses also speculates on other masthead moves for various up-and-comers, including Lucky's relatively new editor, Brandon Holley, whose "women’s service and Web background could make her a dark-horse candidate for Glamour," presumably to take over for Leive if she ascends …

BPA Worldwide has changed some rules and added others to aid in the increasingly difficult job of accurately measuring a magazine's digital audience. For one, downloaded magazine apps can now be reported each month. And "in response to feedback from members, the BPA board has also changed the current format for reporting readers in the 'print,' 'digital' and 'both' categories," writes Ioanna Opidee. For more specifics, check out her post.

Want to watch track stars run virtually around your living room? For the first time ever, Olympics fans will be able to see their favorite athletes televised in 3D format this summer, as NBC Sports Group and Panasonic will make the London 2012 Summer Games available to all U.S. distributors. No official word on which cable operators will carry the 3D torch, but "presumably Comcast -- which owns NBCUniversal -- will be in the mix, along with DirecTV, which has aimed to be the leading provider of 3DTV in the U.S.," writes Todd Spangler.

So what's the scorecard on last year's magazine ad pages? In  the first report on Publishers Information Bureau figures we've seen,  New York magazine is touted as number two in ad pages for 2011, with a total of 2,607 -- up almost 6% from 2010. People, usually a big winner in this category, is no. 1. There's more on New York's good 2011, a year that "saw the magazine snap up Frank Rich..., have a couple articles optioned to become movies, take home multiple Ellies and much more," writes Chris O'Shea.