A late entrant into the bidding for Variety is now in the lead: hedge fund Avenue Capital, co-owner of American Media, which is the parent of the National Enquirer, according to an anonymous source cited by Ben Fritz. The former leading candidate to own the iconic Hollywood trade, billionaire Ron Burkle, "has recently fallen behind other interested parties," writes Fritz.

A day after the announcement of outgoing BBC head Mark Thompson's appointment to New York Times CEO, the commentary has already begun. The Times "needs both a visionary and an intellectual acrobat who can grow new businesses and adapt to shifting market needs while the old model continues to shrink. So is Mark Thompson, a man who has spent his entire career running a government-funded broadcaster, the right person for the job?" asks Matthew Ingram. Possibly not, according to Ingram, since "a government-funded entity with a guaranteed revenue stream is a very different animal from a publicly-traded …

In a new kind of TV programming guide, Boxfish's iPad app, which went live in the Apple App Store Tuesday, presents   "a constantly updating stream of trends and topics – think Tweetdeck, but for live TV" -- to see what's being discussed right then on 3,600 TV stations, writes Janko Roettgers. "And the app can be synched with a TiVo or a DirecTV set-top box to help users change the channel every time they want to tune into a conversation. However, there’s no esy way to filter out channels that a subscriber doesn’t have access to."  

In a streaming coincidence, Boston.com, the Boston Globe's digital product, launched an online radio station, Radio BDC, this week, while Huffington Post debuted an online TV-style video network. "Both Boston.com and The Huffington Post want to use digital distribution to offer something like a traditional broadcast product, but at a much lower cost than what starting a TV network or radio station ran pre-Internet," writes Justin Ellis. "They both also want a shot at a new channel of advertising dollars to complement the display-heavy advertising they rely on with their main products."

Folio, the pub that covers the magazine business, is launching a metered paywall for its digital edition, effective immediately, "to place a clear value on our content," and "allow us to invest in Foliomag.com... adding regular multimedia features, more voices, more connectivity and more content," writes Editor Bill Mickey. "Also, as a brand that covers the digital-media transformation, we seek to not just reflect what the industry is doing, but to lead it as well." Readers will have access to eight articles a month "on a complementary [sic] basis" (Memo to Folio folks: please correct this misspelling/misused word, …

It's fairly obvious that former Cosmopolitan editor Helen Gurley Brown, who died Monday at the age of 90, was the precursor to "Sex and the City'"s Carrie Bradshaw, as Brown's New York Timesobit notes. She also wrote the revolutionary-for-its-time book (1962) "Sex and the Single Girl," and her emphasis on "sex, sex, sex" (a word repeated three times in the obit's headline) in Cosmo's pages also "helped reinvent magazines" (as a photo caption proclaims). "The look of women’s magazines today — a sea of voluptuous models and titillating cover lines — is due in no small part to …

Rolling Stone magazine debuts its third iOs app, one of two available for the iPhone, called Rolling Stone: Music News. The app, whose content can be personalized to the user, "promises 'real-time music news, artist photos and exclusive videos straight from the editors of Rolling Stone,' including breaking news alerts," writes Stuart Dredge. "Publisher Wenner Media has yet to launch an app providing the issues of Rolling Stone itself, though," according to Dredge. "That’s not a surprise, with boss Jann Wenner having spoken out publicly against the magazine industry’s fervour for apps in May 2011."

Who will buy premium cable channel Starz now that Liberty Media has reportedly put it on the market as a separate entity? Jeanine Poggi provides an analysis of the channel's pros and cons with analysts' help, along with a rundown of a short list of potential buyers. "Comcast is the most likely acquirer," according to one analyst, but don't rule out News Corp., Viacom, Time Warner or Netflix (which is still a long shot). In other acquisition buzz, "CBS is considering a bid for Dick Clark Productions and would join other bidders including 'American Idol' host Ryan …

Several takes on the diminished future of print magazines just appeared in The New York Times. In the first, Times editors lament the death of the print version of Bird Talk, (targeted to those concerned with, yes, the beings that literally do tweet), and ask readers to comment on which late magazines they miss the most. Magazine with the most mentions? Gourmet. In another post, David Carr notes the ominous nature of the latest newsstand circulation figures for the mag industry overall (almost 10% down); analyzes the mistakes made by Newsweek Editor Tina Brown, "an odd …

The producers of the highly rated Indian show "Satyamev Jayate" process a mountain of consumer data: More than 1.2 billion people have connected with it across digital, social and mobile media, with over 8 million contributing  "more than 14 million responses to the show’s content via Facebook, web comments, text-message votes and a telephone hotline," writes Derrick Harris. Harris explains how the producers have worked with an IT consultancy to automate its analysis of viewer data "to inspire ideas for future shows and to populate a weekly radio show." But what we found most interesting was how …