Eideard

Remember when CNN was one of the best news sources in the world?

CNN President Jim Walton announced a major shakeup of CNN management today, replacing the head of CNN/US with a long-time CNN executive known for his business turn-around skills.

HLN head Ken Jautz takes over as executive vice president of CNN/US, replacing Jonathan Klein, who headed the network for six years. CNN’s chief marketing officer Scot Safon will run HLN, replacing Jautz.

Walton also said he would hire a managing editor to “help leverage our newsgathering resources across multiple platforms.”

Most recently, Jautz has presided over the revamp and rebranding of the HLN channel, introducing [crap] signature programs such as Nancy Grace, Joy Behar, ShowBiz Tonight, Issues with Jane Velez Mitchell and Morning Express with Robin Meade…

Safon takes over HLN after heading CNN’s marketing for the last eight years, winning wide industry accolades for his marketing campaign for CNN and CNN=Politics. Before joining CNN, Safon oversaw marketing for one of CNN’s sister channels, TNT…

We continue to witness the devolution of a seminal news organization into the sort of grubby, entertainment-centered crap machine that doesn’t grow past mediocrity at that role.

The only person associated with CNN who deserves concern is Ted Turner – who admits that selling his networks to Time-Warner was the dumbest thing he ever did.

Time Warner Cable has signed up at least seven large media companies for a test that will offer television programs on the Internet to paying subscribers…says the Wall Street Journal.

Networks participating in the trial are expected to include General Electric Co’s Syfy, Time Warner Inc’s TNT, Cablevision Systems Corp’s AMC and the British Broadcasting Corp’s BBC America, people told the paper.

Other companies that could be involved in the trial are CBS Corp, Discovery Communications Inc and Viacom Inc, the paper cited some of the people as saying.

The te$t involve$ TV show$ being made available on the Web to a limited number of home$, the paper said.

All right. Who went and told them about The Internet?

Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

Time WarnerCable’s hasty retreat from a plan to charge broadband customers by the byte will delay but likely won’t kill efforts to replace all-you-can-eat plans with so-called metered billing arrangements. In the end, the company’s greedy rates, unpersuasive congestion arguments and relatively low threshold caps may have played a bigger role in derailing the plan than adamant consumer opposition to pay-as-you-go broadband at any price.

Still it’s unlikely that any large ISP will try to switch to cell phone-style billing again anytime soon.

“Time Warner Cable has raised the government and consumer flags too high for anyone else to do this anytime in the near future,” Pali Research analyst Richard Greenfield said. “They created a PR nightmare for no reason.”

That proposal came as government agencies began taking steps to make broadband expansion part of the national economic recovery plan.

The two weeks of outrage that followed have made it clear that U.S. consumers do not want to have to calorie-count their internet usage, especially in age where users are adopting such bandwidth-hungry video innovations as the Roku box, Hulu.com’s online television shows and net-centered home media portals like Boxee.

Network congestion is a lie contrived for companies too cheap to construct adequate pipes to your digital hearth and home. If competition is available, they’ll manage to come with the bucks to offer affordable speed and bandwidth to consumers.

What creeps like Time-Warner have tried to do – is what always worked on ignorant pols and even more ignorant consumers before the Web got in the way. Now, we mostly have a picture of what tech exists down the street and across the pond – and we all know there’s no need to roll over and beg for overpriced scraps.

Daylife/AP Photo by Paul Sakuma

One year from now, almost to the day, will be the 10th anniversary of the announcement of what could be the worst corporate marriage in history, the union of America Online and Time Warner.

And still the effects are being sifted.

The latest blow came in the form of a $25 billion write-down by Time Warner to reflect the declining value of AOL. That came alongside worse, but just as familiar, news: that the performance of AOL and Time Inc., the company’s other ailing arm, which publishes magazines like Fortune, Time and Sports Illustrated, is weak and will result in worse-than-expected earnings at the company when it reports 2008 numbers Feb. 4.

AOL and Time Inc. have been twin encumbrances for some time; before Wednesday, Time Warner had already taken more than $100 billion in write-downs to reflect the steady erosion of value at AOL. The corporate narrative that is Time Warner recalls the film “Groundhog Day” – an endless loop of the same story, over and over…

For years, the clause that followed the words Time Warner in print was invariably “the nation’s largest media company.” Advertising Age, the trade publication, says it has ranked Time Warner the biggest media company in the United States since 1995. But last week it said that Time Warner would become No. 2 to Comcast after it completed the spinoff of its cable unit.

If Bewkes can find a way to slough off AOL and maybe even the magazine business, it will become smaller.

I can find little to say that’s encouraging or even palliative. I think Time-Warner has done more to destroy journalism in the United States than anyone this side of Ed Gaylord.