SIU: Battlefield Breakdown

In today's post:

• Reminder
• SIU: Battlefield Breakdown
• CNN Website Makeover
• Pipeline
• Mystery Journalist

Reminder

American Morning will broadcast Monday morning from both sides of the pond.

John Roberts will be in London with updates on the recent terrorist attacks in the U.K.

Kiran Chetry will be broadcasting from New York.

American Morning airs Monday - Friday, 6 a.m. - 9 a.m. (ET)

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SIU: Battlefield Breakdown

Did you get the opportunity to catch one of the SIU: Battlefield Breakdown broadcasts this weekend?

Excellent program, although as with many of the stories that we hear from Iraq, hard to watch. The program paints a grim picture of the mistakes that have been made during the Iraq war. After 4 years on the ground, there have been improvements, but those improvements have come only after the loss of lives. Stephen Castner was a serviceman who was killed on his third day in Iraq. Kay Castner, his mother, said during an interview: I don’t feel that somebody calling my son a hero answer’s my questions for me. I want the army to tell us what happened.

John King amassed a few frequent flyer miles working on this project. Here’s the list of locations that I noted(I might be missing a few):

• Baghdad, Iraq
• Ballad, Iraq
• Washington, DC
• Letterkenny, Pennsylvannia
• Fort Stewart, Georgia
• Cedarsburg, Wisconsin
• Corpus Christi, Texas
• Dallas, Texas
• Fort Irwin, California

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CNN Website Makeover

CNN.com unveiled a new look this weekend.

From the behind the scenes CNN.com blog: Hello and welcome to the RELAUNCHED CNN.com! Our new site is the culmination of over a year of listening, researching, analyzing, and building a site to meet your needs. If there were an "easy button" for news, this is what you'd expect.

Some of the highlights of the new and improved website:

• Cleaner, less cluttered look
• A link to a full listing of CNN’s blogs (long overdue)
• Easy access to TV program specific information
• Ability to search for CNN videos from the main page
• Quick links to Hot Topics

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Pipeline

Starting tomorrow, July 2, the content that was originally only available through the CNN Pipeline subscription service will be available for free through CNN’s website. Browsing around earlier today, it appeared that some of that content was already available online.

Why the change? This is the explanation posted to the CNN.com blog:

So, why are we changing to a new model and a new service? Couple of reasons. First, as popular as the service was, it became clear to us that reaching true scale was going to be impossible if the product remained a pay service. Remember that our entire mission is about getting more news to more people on more platforms… and too few people actually subscribed for us to meet that goal. Second, once we built our new flash video experience in the Integrated Story presentation on CNN.com, we realized that that was a better experience than even the Pipeline player for videos. There are no load times, no pop-up players, no changing software environment to worry about, and you can get more context for the story in an integrated way. In short, we could create a better news experience within CNN.com than on any other site, and once that includes free live Pipeline content, our new site will be a game changer.

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Mystery Journalist

This week's Mystery Journalist: CNN's senior political correspondent, Candy Crowley.

Thanks to all of those who have been playing along with us! I'll post another Mystery Journalist clue in Friday's post.

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A note to our Canadian readers: Happy Canada Day!