Free Republic

[From CNN CEO memo making the announcement]: Ultimately, the goal is that the kind of front-page reporting and analysis that captures a news event, translates its meaning and shapes the dialogue about the story will continue to emerge in even more prominent and more accessible ways to CNN’s audiences. The search for this person is currently underway.

CNN was so sick of Lou Dobbs, it gave him an $8 million severance package to leave, The Post has learned. "They wanted him out," according to a source. Dobbs, who a source said had a year and a half to go on his $12 million contract, shocked viewers last Wednesday by announcing he was quitting. CNN boss Jonathan Klein and Dobbs, 64, had been publicly feuding over the kind of reporting Dobbs was doing on his show -- especially stories about illegal immigration and the anti-Obama "birther" movement, which contends the president was not born in Hawaii and is...

CNN's new boss ready to hunt Fox By David Bauder Associated Press Jonathan Klein wants to bring out the Bronx in CNN. There's a toughness, an aggressiveness imbued in many residents of the new CNN chief's native borough. They have street smarts that residents of posher neighborhoods have rarely needed to get ahead. Stamping that underdog personality on CNN requires nothing short of an attitude transplant, a willingness to fight at a complacent organization knocked on its heels by years of executive turmoil and ratings dominance by scrappy rival Fox News Channel. In four months on the job, the former...

NEW YORK (Reuters) - CNN News Group on Monday said it has tapped an online media CEO as its new president overseeing U.S. news, just a little over a year after it hired a former local TV newsman to run its domestic operations. Jonathan Klein, founder and chief executive officer of The FeedRoom Inc., a high-speed Internet news network and video streamer, will assume the role of head of U.S. news operations, answering to CNN President Jim Walton. CNN is the cable news unit of Time Warner Inc. "Six years steeped in the digital information industry have helped me understand...

For a couple days this week, one of the most reviled men in the blogosphere was Jonathan Klein, formerly an executive at CBS News. Speaking on Friday about the scandal at 60 Minutes, which last week based part of a story on documents that were probably forged, he stuck up for the show he used to oversee by sneering at its online critics: "You couldn't have a starker contrast between the multiple layers of check and balances [at 60 Minutes] and a guy sitting in his living room in his pajamas writing." Since then, dozens of those pajama-clad bloggers have...