The unveiling by CNN

CNN is giving its website a relaunch on Monday of next week.

There is a full rundown and analysis over at TechCrunch who were party to the preview in New York yesterday where Kenneth Estenson, Senior Vice President and General Manager of CNN.com told the audience that

there are two reasons to change CNN.com: the site wants to constantly move forward, and it wants to help expose the wealth of content that exists beyond what sits on the homepage. The site wants to emphasize breaking news, and more video, as well as perspective and analysis, and keep it easy to use.

CNN aims to be the No 1 news wire

Over at Content Bridges Ht-Richard Sambrook,Ken Doctor looks at CNN's strategy of making itself the best and the most important news wire service.

Back in September 2007 Ken reminds us that

CNN terminated its multi-million contract with Reuters. That was a key signal: it would stop receiving one of the world's major wire services and embark on the road to becoming one.

Now to ne launched in December the news service will publically set out its vision for the future.

It may be a fortuiotoes time to launch as Ken notes

The relationship between those newspapers and AP has never been more tenuous -- the perfect time for an interloper to move in.

but he also asks

Is it really prepared to move from being a news medium to becoming a vendor, with all the to-be-built-out infrastructure and ongoing customer service that requires

CNN creeps onto Freeview

Another sign that hard news is replacing celeb gossip.

This from Digital Spy

CNN International will replace Nuts TV on Freeview early next year, Turner Broadcasting has confirmed.
The channel's block of programming aimed at European audiences will air every night between 9pm and 1am. Allocation of a channel number is pending.

Fox targets CNN and claims its audience is more balanced

Ahead of the Democratic convention,Fox news is fighting back over bias claims.The American news channel has taken out an advert which targets CNN which according to the Huffington Post

inserting the word "partisan" into CNN's "CNN = Politics" logo to read, "CNN = Partisan Politics" and declaring Fox news "The Only Fair & Balanced News Network."

Really?

Well the channel is using a report from Pew which looked at audience segmentation and how it digested news across all platforms.One of its findings was that

the audiences for specific cable news outlets remain divided along political lines. Currently 51% of regular CNN viewers are Democrats, up from 45% two years ago. Nearly four-in-ten regular Fox News viewers are Republicans (39%), about the same as in 2006

Meanwhile if you want evidence of the battle that Fox has take a look at this Fox report from Denver where protesters make their feelings on Fox's coverage

How many correspondents does it take (2)

Yesterday I blogged about the story of 472 BBC employees hanging on the edge of their telephones over discussions about covering the US conventions

Well today it seems that CNN have taken a more realistic approach to reporting the convention.

Bill Schneider, its political analyst was quoted as saying

There will be more than 10,000 reporters at the convention and very little real news.
But plenty of news of the contrived or press release-generated variety! How many reporters is CNN sending? (We’re sending two —hoping, of course, to find “news” among those 10,000 reporters with nothing “real” to report).

Where ethics cross the line.

A reporter from CNN whilst interviewing a journalist wounded in Iraq blurred the boundaries between objective reporting and .

Howard Kurtz invited Kimberly Dozier onto his show on Sunday(reports the New York Times)to discuss the latters book.During the Interview extracts were read out.

Then at the end of the interview,Kurtz said

“I should mention that my wife has done some promotion work for Kim Dozier’s book.”

According to the report

The interview represented another complicated tangle in the complex world of Mr. Kurtz. He is paid by two of the nation’s largest media entities — The Washington Post Company, which employs him as a media reporter, and Time Warner, which owns CNN — to cover the doings at their news organizations, and those at their competitors’. But several media ethicists interviewed in recent days said that, given the financial arrangement between Ms. Dozier’s publisher, Meredith Books, and Ms. Annis, Mr. Kurtz should not have done this particular interview at all.

Kurtz maintains that the disclosure was sufficient in itself to cover the ethical question but surely it would have been a simpler option to get someone else to do the interview?

King denies rumoursof his imminent demise

An update on a story from earlier in the week in which it was rumoured that Larry King was stepping down from Cnn and being replaced by Ryan Seacrest

Yesterday Larry denied that any changes were imminent.

The New York Times reports that 74 year old King

invited Mr. Seacrest on as a guest Thursday night and then sought to tamp down speculation that any succession was imminent.
After detailing Mr. Seacrest’s many jobs — including as host of “American Idol,” a nightly entertainment newscast on E! and a morning radio show — Mr. King said: “There were even rumors you were going to join CNN, which we can tell viewers, there’s nothing to that.”

Another decent into oblivion for American hard news coverage

Just when America needs its Jeremy Paxman it is poised to get its Vernon Kay.

writes Charles Lawrence over at First Post.The news doing the gossip rounds is that Larry King i going to be replaced on CNN by Ryan Seacrest,who made his name on the American version of Simon Cowell.

Not mincing his words,Charles describes him as

the ultimate in vanilla sponge broadcasting

and says it will be

a giant step in the castration of American journalism

Whereas King has interviewed all the major politians in his long career,Seacrest has appeared on Gladiators and Wild Animal Games