Saving CNN
| “Five chiefs since 2000. A revolving door of on-air employees. Start-stop attempts at lite-news programming. Hiring-practice lawsuits. Hollywood producers trying to “cast” anchors. CNN, to quote Jason Robards in Crimson Tide: “You’ve made one hell of a mess here.” And to quote the USS Alabama’s radio operator: “Recommend Alert One!” Still, CNN can be saved.”

You Can Blog, but You Can’t Hide
| “Thirty-two years ago, the Supreme Court held that the First Amendment does not create a journalist’s privilege: like anyone else, journalists must testify when ordered to do so. But Justice Lewis Powell, in a cryptic three-paragraph concurrence, wrote that there should be a modest privilege protecting journalists from unnecessary harassment by law enforcement. In such cases, he wrote, journalists should be allowed to claim the privilege, and courts should try to strike “a proper balance between freedom of the press and the obligation of all citizens to give relevant testimony with respect to criminal conduct.”

The Magic That Makes Google Tick
| “Google’s vice-president of engineering was in London this week to talk to potential recruits about just what lies behind that search page. ZDNet UK snuck in to listenThe numbers alone are enough to make your eyes water. Over four billion Web pages, each an average of 10KB, all fully indexed. Up to 2,000 PCs in a cluster Over 30 clusters. No complete system failure since February 2000.”