Even when the M&A market was shut down, Wall Street couldn’t stop speculating about GE’s intentions for its NBC Universal unit. And now that it’s deal-making time again, the chatter is getting very noisy.

Hence the flurry of coverage over yesterday’s remarks by Vivendi CEO Jean-Bernard Levy, in which he said…not very much.

But even Levy’s noncomments are important, since his company may have a good deal to say about the fate of NBCU. That’s because Vivendi owns a 20 percent stake in the company, and it looks increasingly likely to sell this year. And that could trigger a whole series of moves. The Wall Street Journal:

Vivendi, the Paris-based entertainment conglomerate, has an annual option to unload its NBCU stake which it is allowed to exercise beginning each November. The option was part of a deal made in 2003 when Vivendi sold its theme parks and television assets in the U.S. to GE for cash and stock.

If Vivendi exercises the option this year, Mr. Levy said, it will plan to offer the shares in the public stock market unless GE exercises its right to buy the stake.

If Vivendi says it will exercise the option this year, GE would have nine months to pony up an estimated $4 billion to $5 billion if it chooses to buy Vivendi’s stake at a time when it already is struggling to shore up its financial position. Otherwise, Vivendi’s minority stake in NBCU could be put in play, raising a host of potential complications for GE’s ownership of the media company.

Yet another option: GE (GE) and Vivendi work together to sell off all of NBC via a direct sale–Comcast (CMCSA) and Time Warner (TWX) are the names you always hear as obvious strategic buyers, though I’m not sure that’s the case–or even via an IPO.

Finke moved Deadline Hollywood Daily, her one-woman operation, from LA Weekly to Penske’s burgeoning Web empire in June. At the time, she promised to hire a “senior” journalist, based in New York City, within three months.

Now Penske tells me that the new hire, whom he describes as a “well-known figure from established media,” has been locked up, is finishing paperwork, and will be on board within two weeks. Finke also promises to have hires in “London, Paris, Mumbai, Hong Kong, and Sydney” within the next year.

Not that long ago, it would have been inconceivable to see a big-name media macher go to work for a one-woman blog owned by a white-label email services provider. But now that Web publishing has lost most (but not all) of its reputation as a backwater for second-raters, wannabes and has-beens, and now that traditional publishing is on life support, it’s a whole lot more believable.

So. Who’s making the leap and jumping into the digital pool with the rest of us? (It’s great fun! You’ll love it! Unless you hate it!) A few of us have been guessing at names for a bit, but there’s no reason to keep our parlor game to ourselves.

Feel free to speculate in comments below, though you’ll have to use your real name if you do. If you’re feeling shy, you can reach me directly at peter@allthingsd.com. And if you want to be completely anonymous, which is understandable but less useful to me (I won’t have any way of reaching you for follow-up) you can use the blind tip box here.

Editors’ Note: December 22, 2008
Earlier this morning, we posted a letter that carried the name of Bertrand Delanoë, the mayor of Paris, sharply criticizing Caroline Kennedy.

This letter was a fake. It should not have been published.

Doing so violated both our standards and our procedures in publishing signed letters from our readers.

We have already expressed our regrets to Mr. Delanoë’s office and we are now doing the same to you, our readers.

This letter, like most Letters to the Editor these days, arrived by email. It is Times procedure to verify the authenticity of every letter. In this case, our staff sent an edited version of the letter to the sender of the email and did not hear back. At that point, we should have contacted Mr. Delanoë’s office to verify that he had, in fact, written to us.

We did not do that. Without that verification, the letter should never have been printed.

We are reviewing our procedures for verifying letters to avoid such an incident in the future.”

Expect this story to generate a lot of new media rulz! from the blogosphere. But you can file that in the same place you put the “Twitter is like a news wire, only better!” arguments. I’m just glad the Times can afford to have a staff big enough to verify the authenticity of every letter it prints. And I worry that this won’t be the case in the near future.

While it’s true that Time Warner’s (TWX) magazine unit is embattled, there are bright spots in the portfolio. Take People.com: The gossip magazine has always been one of Time’s strongest performers (good luck trying to find a discounted subscription). Now its companion Web site is, too.

The site boasts 8.6 million unique monthly visitors, per comScore (SCOR), up 36 percent in the last year, and generates a staggering 700 million page views per month–per Omniture (OMTR). Meanwhile, once-hot sites like TMZ.com (another Time Warner property) have tailed off.

Much of the credit for that goes to Mark Golin, the awesomely sharp and frumpy editor best known as the man behind Maxim magazine’s rise, way back in the late 1990s. He’s successfully broadened the site beyond just Britney/Paris/Lindsay news by adding features like a game channel, a shopping channel and the like.

One of the most successful expansions came via acquisition: When People.com bought Celebrity Baby Blog back in May, it was generating 6.9 million page views per month. Now it’s doing 30 million, Time execs say. And before my fellow journobloggers dismiss the work that the people at Celebrity Baby Blog do, ask yourself this: Did you know that Ashlee Simpson has named her kid Bronx Mowgli? Aren’t you glad you know now?

In any case, all those page views are translating into actual dollars–not digital pennies, as NBC’s Jeff Zucker would say. Time Inc. says People.com is now one of its 10 most profitable titles–that’s out of all of the company’s 174 properties, on or offline.

The company won’t attach numbers to that claim, of course. But given that Time Inc. generated $162 million in operating profit during a very lousy third quarter, you can get some sense of the property’s success. Now Time just needs many more just like it.

This won’t help former Yahoos who don’t have a nest egg, health insurance, and/or the drive or inclination to do their own thing. But it’s free advice, and it’s relatively sound advice for those who do want to strike out on their own.

Don’t be alarmed by the fact that there are 119 slides here–most of them have just a few words each. Around slide 79, Buckman slips into mini-pitch mode for Magnatune, his indie music distribution company. But that doesn’t last long–just power through. Oh–and don’t be alarmed by the title. Buckman’s point is that you’ll be happier working for yourself than you were working for Jerry Yang and co.