Bring back the O'Briens

CNN recently replaced Miles O'Brien and Soledad O'Brien as anchors of American Morning with two new anchors John Roberts and Kiran Chetry. Chetry and Roberts have sub'd for either O'Brien for the past couple of months.

For years I used to wake up to CNNfn, with the TV set to go on at 6:59 a.m. The routine has evolved, first to watching NY1 for an hour, and with the shutdown of CNNfn, watching American Morning for an hour.

The appeal of CNNfn and eventually American Morning was that it was mostly hard news. Not soft fluffy Katie Couric news, real interviews, real discussion. No shoutouts to the dozen reality TV shows on the network, no flacking for advertisers (that I can recall).

Just news

CNN has been falling in my estimation for awhile, but this week is just jarring. This morning's American Morning felt amateur, you would think they'd never produced a live onsite show before (in Blacksburg, VA). It was painful to watch Roberts and Chetry.

I flipped it back on this afternoon and, aside from repeatedly rerunning interviews held earlier in the day, the production values have fallen off-track (I don't know which anchor was on just now but she had a terrible time getting through a basic update sentence, maybe they fired the teleprompters when they booted the O'Briens?).

I agree with Todd, bring back the O'Briens. Until CNN does, I'm switching over to Bloomberg.

Aside to the ibm.com webmasters who may or may not still read this While looking for Turbo's blog, I tried:

1. http://www.ibm.com/ebusiness/blog which 302'd to
2. http://www.ibm.com/e-business/blog which 302'd to
3. http://www.ibm.com/e-business/ondemand/blog which 302'd to
4. http://www-306.ibm.com/e-business/ondemand/blog which 404'd

I know, I know, that's not the way to find things on ibm.com. But here's the thing: I tried trimming back "blog", then "ondemand" and mistakenly ended up with http://www-306.ibm.com/e-business// (note the double slash there). That returned a page which apparently hasn't been updated since 2004. Trimming the extra "/" off yields another redirect to http://www.ibm.com/innovation/us (god, who came up with this setup …oh, wait, er, nevermind). Sounds like son (or grandson) of the redirect manager isn't normalizing URLs to convert doubled "//" to single "/". I am likely the only person in the galaxy who would notice this, on the other hand the content should probably 410 if it's not going to 302 to the latest and greatest marketing scheme.