The speculation over who fills Richard Parsons’ CEO job at Time Warner Inc. is over, as Jeffrey Bewkes has been named company chief, effective Jan. 1.

Now the guesswork begins over what Bewkes, currently Time Warner president, will do to improve performance at the media giant. Indications are that Bewkes will come out swinging.

Awkward. That’s the best way to describe John Bowman’s position in the writers strike that began today. He is chairman of the negotiating committee for the Writers Guild of America, but also executive producer of the new series, “Frank TV,” starring comedian Frank Caliendo.

By striking, Bowman is walking away from his producer job.

This is the first industrywide writers strike since 1988. About 12,000 movie, TV, radio and animation writers are involved.

The No Child Left Behind act is a bonanza for private tutoring firms, including Sylvan Learning.

Under the act’s provisions, students enrolled in schools judged to be failing are entitled to free tutoring, paid for by taxpayers. The costs total $2.5 billion annually, according to U.S. News and World Report.

Tutoring companies contract with individual states and school districts. Sylvan provides such tutoring at about half of its 1,200 U.S. locations, according to Tabatha Sweeney-Gehrt, Sylvan’s director of new business development. At some centers, she says, business has doubled because of the service.

English football teams are the latest craze for U.S. sports tycoons.

New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft, in the United Kingdom for the NFL game in London last weekend between the New York Giants and the Miami Dolphins, says he is interested in buying a Premier League soccer – oops, football – team. He already owns Major League Soccer’s New England Revolution.

“We looked seriously at Liverpool,” he told Sky Sports News on Thursday, unwilling to disclose which team he wants to buy. “We still do have an interest in playing in the Premier League. We’d like to close our deal and then talk about it.”

New York City’s ambitious charter school initiative gets a new director this month in Michael Thomas Duffy, fresh from a successful run in Roxbury, Mass.

The city has about 60 charter schools, but Mayor Michael Bloomberg has said he wants 100 by the time he leaves office in 2009. So Duffy has a big goal to meet.