In fact, Bartz practically sounded like a gushy “Entertainment Tonight” flunky when talking to Wall Street analysts about Yahoo’s Oscar news, games and other offerings. She proudly noted the site’s efforts generated more than a billion pages views.

There will be more of that, it seems, with the elevation of Yahoo exec Sam Silverstein (pictured here) as head of its special events coverage. Sources said it will be a major area of emphasis, given obvious advertiser interest.

It’s all part of a lot of dramatic changes being made in the media unit at Yahoo, which is run by its newish Audience head Mickie Rosen.

Previous to his new duties, Silverstein has been mostly focused on major sports events for Yahoo, but has also been managing content on its front page and in tech and green arenas.

The move to taking over more comes after Lawrence Yee–who led Yahoo entertainment efforts and was once the managing editor of its omg! celebrity site–headed to TMZ.com, the competing and much sassier celebrity site, owned by AOL. His new job is as managing editor of its TooFab site, TMZ overlord Harvey Levin confirmed to me.

Also gone recently is Annette Cardwell, who was managing editor of Yahoo’s Shine women’s site, who is now working as director of digital content and games at Future US, according to her LinkedIn profile.

Now it will be up to Silverstein, who is well-regarded at Yahoo, to run the upcoming Royal Wedding coverage by himself.

William and Kate, as well as Bartz, will be watching.

Aside: Remember when NBC and “Saturday Night Live” didn’t really want their stuff on the Web? Now they make stuff designed for Internet distribution–note shout-outs here to Amazon, Orbitz, Facebook, FarmVille, Netflix and Angry Birds. And porn!

This is SNL’s second crack at Assange. Last week, it imagined what he’d do if he morphed into Harvey Levin. Also quite good!

Seems likely, according to recent reports. And it makes plenty of sense.

For starters, it’s what the Time Warner (TWX) gossip powerhouse is already doing. See: Tiger Woods, of course. Or more recently, coverage of NFL player Chris Henry’s death.

It’s also something that Harvey Levin’s operation is uniquely suited to do. Blogs like Sports By Brooks and Gawker Media’s Deadspin are excellent repositories for R-rated commentary on sports and periodically break a story themselves. But in general, they either don’t or can’t spend the resources on the grim digging and scooping that TMZ specializes in.

And the conventional media outlets, which depend on the sports leagues for access and/or licensing rights, are loath to dip too deeply into this stuff. They are also likely worried about spooking advertisers, but that doesn’t seem to be an issue for TMZ’s existing product.

My only request: If there’s a companion TV show, can we please dump the “Harvey Levin and his producers sit around the news room and kibbitz” conceit? Don’t like that one bit.

On the spur of the moment yesterday–as Los Angeles was gridlocked by the memorial service for pop legend Michael Jackson–BoomTown decided to pay a quick visit to Harvey Levin, who runs TMZ.

Located on Sunset Boulevard–natch!–TMZ is the celebrity news Web site that actually broke the news of Jackson’s death, before any other media outlet.

And it has pretty much led the coverage as the sad story has unfolded–and continues to.

In fact, TMZ–which stands for the “30-mile zone” of Hollywood and also has a television show–is one of the great content sites on the Internet.

It uses a nice blend of text, video, audio and a laser focus on intense reporting on its topic to yield a whole new kind of media that is Web-born and -bred.

As I always note: Levin covers the tribulations of celebrities, like Britney Spears, as if they were the Iraq war.

TMZ, which will soon undergo a refresh of its design, is owned by Time Warner (TWX). It was launched in 2005 jointly by its Telepictures and AOL units.

Here’s a video interview I did with Levin about hubbub around Jackson yesterday and other topics, such as paying for tips and the convergence of online and offline (and, below it, is also a video tour of TMZ I did in late 2007, just after it launched its television show):