Hooray! Brad Grey will be at Paramount at least as long as his immediate predecessors, with a reported new contract extending his leadership through 2014.

After several months of negotiations, Universal has closed its deal to sell genre-mill Rogue Pictures to the studio's close financing partners at Relativity Media.

Variety today offers a disturbing memo to anyone who had "DreamWorks' resurgence FTW" in their forecast of industry predictions for 2009: Maybe next year.

Ever think that Oprah Winfrey's potent brand of self-actualization could use some more bare breasts? You're in luck!

This holiday season, what do you give the shy, socially awkward single man who has everything but a girlfriend? One publisher is betting he'll crave seduction techniques by 9-year-old Alec Greven, the author of the slim new volume How to Talk to Girls. And beyond that, 20th Century Fox will see Greven's book deal and raise it a movie option. Commence sobbing, all you script-hoarding baristas!

The successful Cheech and Chong reunion tour has found precisely the messiah you'd expect to bring the pot-culture icons to the wider audience that slipped away from them almost 30 years ago: The Weinstein Company. Harvey and Bob today announced they are clearing space on their cluttered basement shelf for The Cheech and Chong Concert Movie, which the brothers acquired for worldwide theatrical, DVD and TV release in 2009. And the really funny thing? This may turn out to be their most profitable release of the year.And not just because TWC picked it up for roughly $500 and a tank of gas to San Diego, where the film will shoot next March. That won't hurt, but compared to the rest of the Weinstein slate — most notably the high-end gambles Inglourious Basterds [sic] and Nine— the The Cheech and Chong Concert Movie is the only place the Weinsteins make money these days: Cheaply acquired genre-cult junk. And we mean that as a good thing; the comedians' manager told Variety that the tour has "already grossed in eight figures, and a licensing deal has netted roughly $9 per concertgoer" — rock concert numbers, not 70-year-old burnout numbers. Roll that over to the DVD/cable/streaming markets where both the audience that pushed them to equally strong numbers in the '70s and '80s and their stoner kids are watching? Back up the Brinks truck! Who needs Fergie's labia, anyway?

It only takes hearing so many jokes about Al Gore inventing Twitter to figure out that the former vice president has signed up for the microblogging service. Wisely, he's not really participating in the site, just using it to market his websites and announce his interview with Digg founder Kevin Rose, which airs tonight on Current, the Gore-backed cable channel. Current and Digg have been teaming up for a series of election-related events, including a party on election night. But Rose and Gore's acquaintance goes back almost two years.In late 2006, Gore's Current made an offer for Digg which valued the social-news startup at $100 milion or more. Wonder if Rose and Gore discussed business at all in this interview. As VentureBeat recently pointed out, Digg's traffic is flat, and it hasn't significantly increased its valuation since Rose and Gore's 2006 chat.

What's a struggling network to do when faced with last-place ratings, corporate inertia and a few dozen mouldering costumes from a hit going off the air? If you're NBC Universal, you invite the world to a yard sale, as it's planning to do Jan. 16 in order to cash in on the final season of Battlestar Galactica. The geek gold rush is on, and its nervous hosts in Pasadena are stocking up on canned goods and bottled water as we speak.NBCU has been plotting a Battlestar prop auction since the summer, trickling out such must-sorta-haves as Cylon War-era flight suits and War Room chalkboards on a Web site ranking right below asthma inhalers among fanboy essentials. The network has hosted such events before, previously cashing in at last year's Heroes/Office/30 Rock sale. But the international interest in Battlestar sparked a recent run on hotel rooms in and around the Pasadena Convention Center, we hear, with the artifacts' online clearing house now offering a handy guide to making the most of that slavering southern pilgrimage. Which, in the end, is fine with us; anything that helps pay off NBC's Olympics debt and keeps us in Jeff Zucker profiles is a true public service in the long run.

Officially, the New York Times Company isn't commenting on tech executive Jason Calacanis' claim that it is shopping reference site About.com in an effort to shore up its financial position and perhaps go private. But two anonymous sources poured cold water on his statements, according to Peter Kafka of All Things Digital, denying that the profitable property is on the block. Perhaps a rogue banker is trying to drum up interest in a (hypothetical) deal before taking it to the Times, hoping to score some business. Or maybe Calacanis just got his wires crossed. But lack of any dealmaking will hardly tamp down speculation over how the Times Company will pay down its junk-rated debt. If anything, it makes the situation an even more tricky puzzle.

Yahoo's deal to outsource some of its search advertising to Google continues to face scrutiny on Capitol Hill. Google CEO Eric Schmidt had said he'd carry out the deal whether or not regulators had finished their review. Regulators called his bluff, and America's CTO has now lost face, not to mention credibility. Why not just bow out and move on? That seems easier.

“This is not just unloading AOL for us,” a source close to Time Warner told Kara Swisher. “It is also an important strategic move for our future to get this right.” I love the way anonymous sources lie so convincingly. The truth, Swisher blogs, is both simpler and more boring: Yahoo and AOL don't really like each other. Neither company holds much attraction for the other. Important strategic move means an arranged marriage, forced on both sides by dwindling market value. Which reminds me: We should plot the number of Google engineers whose pending marriages have been "temporarily rescheduled for 2009."

Japanese electronics conglomerate Toshiba has bought a portion of its flash-memory joint venture with SanDisk back from its partner, in a deal worth $1 billion. Some analysts think this makes SanDisk a more attractive buyout candidate for Samsung, which has twice offered $5.85 billion for the Silicon valley company. [WSJ]

We would never imply that Adrian Holovaty, the supremely talented journalist-programmer who's now the CEO of local-news startup EveryBlock, is being cagey or dishonest about his talks with Google, which continued as recently as last weekend. Our theory: He's just shy and bashful, and doesn't like talking about what a hot commodity he is! Sources close to Google confirm that they are very interested in bringing Holovaty, the creator of a set of programming tools called Django, into the Googleplex. There are not one but two hitches, though.First, there are the conditions of his grant from the Knight Foundation, which is currently funding EveryBlock. The Knight Foundation used to have strong ties with the now-defunct Knight-Ridder newspaper chain; some of those ties now reach beyond the corporate grave, a tipster explains:

Forget Facebook's controversial redesign. Users of the social network have something new to complain about: third-rate Web search, provided by Microsoft. The two moves are connected; when ad-hating CEO Mark Zuckerberg forced through the revamp of Facebook's profile pages, he bumped Microsoft-sold banners off of them. To make Microsoft whole, Facebook agreed to a search-advertising deal. You know it must burn Facebook's proud engineers — those who haven't left — to partner with an organization that has done nothing but lose market share for years.

"The Life title is being resurrected as part of a joint venture between Time Inc. and Getty Images that will launch a Web site offering free... downloads from Getty plus the extensive archives from both Getty and the original Life magazine." [Post]

We heard a wild rumor that Getty Images agreed to buy photo-sharing website Flickr from Yahoo. At first blush the gossip sounds crazy. Widely-used Flickr is a crown Web 2.0 jewel for Yahoo, which dissolved its own photo site after acquiring the company, and Getty can already license Flickr photos through a partnership announced in July. But upon further reflection there's a logic to the alleged deal.

As the CEO of a publicly traded company, Time Warner CEO Jeffrey Bewkes is, as he protested to Portfolio's Lloyd Grove, obligated to consider strategic acquisitions as they become available. So he had to say, when Grove asked, that he'd consider buying NBC Universal if GE decided to spin off the media company. But he didn't have to so mildly rebuke speculation he was "intrigued" by such a deal, or go on at such length about the possibility:

CBS bought CNET, the tech-focused online conglomerate, for $1.8 billion earlier this year. Which prompted the general reaction "Really, that much?" And also, "Isn't this two fundamentally boring brands combining to form a larger, still boring brand?" Well one brave man says no, it's much more promising than that: CBS CEO Les Moonves, who engineered the deal! But is he right? It's hard to see why he would be: Moonves is counting on CNET to raise CBS' revenue by two points within three years, which would mean that its online growth would have to offset the "flattening out" of CBS' own TV and radio ad revenue. But CNET is basically a tech news brand, and a pretty unexciting one. CBS is a general interest brand, and an unexciting one. So why try to make CNET another unexciting, general-interest brand?

Gannett, the publisher of USA Today, said earlier this month it plans to cut 1,000 newspaper jobs. Probably not because of all those new potential customers, Gannett today announced its acquired another 10 percent of online jobs site CareerBuilder from Tribune for $135 million, raising its stake to a controlling interest of 50.8 percent. Tribune, which used to be an equal partner with Gannett, now owns 30.8 percent of CareerBuilder. McClatchy, which is also a member of Yahoo's HotJobs newspaper consortium, owns 14.4 percent. Microsoft owns 4 percent.

For its work in turning millions of singles into camgirls and camboys for the sake of a hookup, dating site SpeedDate took in a $6M series B funding round from Menlo Ventures today. You remember, the folks who got poor Eric Eldon from VentureBeat three minutes in video heaven with deathcaster Sarah Austin? With SpeedDate claiming to setup 100,000 dates per day, you're less likely to run into the blogger early adopters lured in to promote the business as you were in its early days. And if dating a blogger is a dealbreaker for you, then you might want to ask yourself: Why are you looking for dates on the Internet again?