Practicalmadness

The Associated Press is reporting that CNN has declined to offer Tucker Carlson a new contract, and with his departure may come the end of Carlson’s long-running debate show Crossfire. New CNN chief executive Jonathan Klein was quoted as saying (quipping?) “I guess I come down more firmly in the Jon Stewart camp.”

The ever-modest Carlson, a conservative pundit for the network since the 2000 presidential election, wanted to move into a more prominent primetime role with such luminaries of respectable journalism as Paula Zahn and Aaron Brown. From the AP story:

[Carlson] subbed last week for newscaster Aaron Brown as Klein wanted to see him in a different role before making a decision about his future. Klein said his views on wanting to change the tone of political coverage were separate from the decision to keep Carlson.

“His career aspirations and our programming needs just don’t synch up,” Klein said. “He wants to host his own nighttime show and we don’t see that in the cards here. Out of respect for him and his talent, we thought it would be best to let him explore opportunities elsewhere.”

LiveJournal Purchased, Somewhat Legitimized

Finally, in a move that will make LiveJournallers around the world react with a resounding “who? what?”, Six Apart, makers of Movable Type, have acquired LiveJournal. As explained by Six Apart president/lead singer Mena Trott:

I have great respect for LiveJournal. I wouldn’t, as a board member, have approved this deal if I didn’t think that this service, company and users were something special. Sure, I realize that there are communities that I can’t understand or necessarily want to encourage, but I also know that there are many types of people out in the world and a great number of them aren’t 27 year-old white women who work at weblogging companies. (…) The funny thing is, you can have a weblog and a LiveJournal. The fact that some of the funniest and smartest people I know have both only reaffirms that we shouldn’t limit ourselves to one sort of publishing/communication mode.

The gist of what’s happening is: Six Apart (who also own the hosted blogging service TypePad) now own LiveJournal. LiveJournal will continue to be a (mostly) free service, with higher paid levels of service/support. While the LiveJournal source code will continue to be open-source, Six Apart will be working to improve it to add such fabulous things as unified APIs and syndication formats (for improved interoperability between LJ and other blogging systems) and support for 6A’s TrackBack reverse-linking technique.

What I think is: this makes sense. Six Apart has been one of the big players in the blog space, but as weblogging/journalling goes mainstream it will become increasingly problematic that their competitors are Google and Microsoft, respectively. (It helps that Microsoft’s product sucks and that Blogger’s engineers are slower than molasses at making feature improvements.) The only thing that Blogger and MSN Spaces have to recommend them above a Six Apart product is that they’re free and easy to use, while Six Apart has no software or service that is both of those things. Whereas LiveJournal is simple enough for beginners, free and has a pretty huge installed base of users.

I suspect that this is a good thing.