Is ZelnickMedia Interested in BusinessWeek?

This might just make things a little more interesting over at BusinessWeek: According to BW's Tom Lowry, ZelnickMedia LLC and L. Gordon Crovitz may be interested in buying the magazine.

Headed by former BMG President and CEO Strauss Zelnick (whose name could easily belong to a Bond villain), the company manages a diverse portfolio of media holdings (among them Take-Two Interactive, publisher of the Grand Theft Auto series) and invests in everything from Time-Life to SkyMall.

Lowry notes that Zelnick tends to "wait until the absolute last minute to submit a bid" and quotes one investment banker as saying of Zelnick, "He likes to hang around the hoop for a long time." Clearly: McGraw-Hill's deadline for interested bidders on the magazine was a week ago. (Although it seems to have been fudged a bit.)

Last week it looked like Bloomberg LP was going to take over the 80-year-old title, but now it's anyone's guess. (According to Lowry, OpenGate Capital is also still in the game.) Yesterday, the New York Post's Keith Kelly described the magazine as "twisting in the wind and the rumor mill is cranking into high gear." On Monday there was a bit of a media kerfuffle when a Time employee named Peter Ha tweeted that he'd heard BusinessWeek was folding. This resulted a furious murder of tweets condemning him. (Ha's Twitter feed is now protected.) Among Ha's antagonists was McGraw-Hill corporate communications head Steven Weiss, who apparently launched his own account just to contact and confront Ha.

Weiss is now tweeting like a pro—did you know Newsweek named McGraw-Hill "one of the Greenest Big Companies in America and Working Mother put it in the top 10 of its "100 Best Companies"?— so something good has come out of this. When someone finally buys BusinessWeek—it'll happen, right?—we're sure Weiss will tweet it up.