It’s 2012 and it’s time for a brand news obsession for me besides the mishegas of Yahoo — and the winner is: Facebook’s upcoming IPO.

Thus, I shall endeavor to scoop all deets great and small about the social networking site’s moving on up to a deluxe public company in the Wall Street sky, which is expected in the spring of this year.

From bankers battling for purchase to who’s selling what to the delightful back and forth with regulators to Google’s lobbing the inevitable screaming meanies at its rival during Facebook’s quiet period, this is going to be a good one.

And CEO and Co-founder Mark Zuckerberg — and his hoodie — are back in the brightest of spotlights!

Speaking of the need for PR, one of the unsung but critical parts of any company’s public offering process is the hiring of an outside communications firm to handle the deluge of media, rumors and other breathless attention Facebook is sure to get.

It’s a highly specific job, given the reporters a company will be dealing with — in this case, sharp-elbowed Wall Street reporters — are usually different than the ones the Silicon Valley start-up has mostly dealt with (the geeks!).

And the expected winner of that thankless job is likely to go to the Brunswick Group, which describes itself as an “international corporate communications partnership that helps businesses and other organizations address critical communications challenges.”

In other words: Will be putting out the endless wildfires sure to rage around tech’s hottest IPO since Google.

Brunswick is among a small group of high-powered strategic communications firms that compete for such high-profile IPO jobs, as well as mergers and acquisitions and other corporate battling.

Others include Sard Verbinnen & Co. (it has worked for Groupon board and Alibaba Group); Joele Frank, Wilkinson Brimmer Katcher (it has toiled for Hewlett-Packard) and Kekst and Company (now cat-wrangling the Yahoo drama).

It’s probably not a surprise that Brunswick won the deal, since it has worked with Facebook in the past, including on its controversial private offering with Goldman Sachs a year ago.

No surprise, everyone declined comment.

Thus, let the Hunger, oops, PR games begin!

Federal prosecutors say they’ve broken up an insider trading ring that scooped up some $4.8 million in illegal gains over a four-year period–some of which came from trades made before EA’s bid for Take-Two became public knowledge. That’d be very lucrative information to have in advance, given that EA was offering a premium of more than 50 percent when it offered to buy the company behind Grand Theft Auto in February.

The quick version (longer summary here): The SEC says that Matthew Devlin, formerly a Lehman Brothers. broker, gained information about secret takeover bids from his wife Nina Devlin, who works for the Brunswick Group, a PR firm that specializes in M&A work. He then passed the tips on to his clients, the SEC alleges.

The SEC hasn’t charged Nina Devlin with anything. In a statement, her employer says she was unaware of what her husband was up to: “This is a violation of trust between husband and wife. Our employee was the victim of a criminal act by her spouse which made detection extremely difficult despite our high standards of confidentiality.”

Electronic Arts’ (ERTS) $2 billion offer for Take-Two (TTWO) was one of 13 deals the trading ring profited on, the SEC says. Unlike most of the other deals, however EA’s proposed purchase never went through. That’s much to the chagrin of ordinary Take-Two investors, who were offered as much as $25.75 per share for stock that’s now trading at less than $9–and just reported dismal results.