Time Warner's CNN is in the midst of rolling out something called CNN Wire, a news feed service that's aimed directly at competing with the Associated Press, the non-profit newspaper consortium whose fee increases have some member papers running for the hills.

Like the AP, CNN Wire is an exercise in group think: Some 3,000 journalists around the globe will contribute to it, and newspapers are already signing up to run the copy. There is also web video available, but no photos (yet), all at costs pitched lower than the AP. Meanwhile, back in September Politico joined the wire fray; it has 67 newspapers on board, including all of Si Newhouse's rags, for its Politico Network product, which only requires newspapers to hand over online advertising space (they split the revenue) in exchange for content.

All of this is bad news for the Associated Press, of course, which once maintained a near lock on wire copy with the occasional Reuters and Agence France-Presse article sneaking in, but now has cheaper (or free-er) competition. But who is this good news for?

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There are two things that mark the success of an online venture: how many unique page views the website gets, and how long individuals spend on each page. Advertisers can pay by the page view, sure, but think about sites like NBC.com or Hulu, where the commercials run in accordance to how long you've been at the page.

What's tricky is in one of these respects, top Internet sites are doing better than ever. But in the other, they are doing significantly worse. Care to journey a guess?

Are people spending more time on their favorite sites, or less time on more sites?

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Bill O'Reilly might act like he's mad tonight if Barack Obama gets elected as President, but in truth it won't change a goddamn thing about the tone over at Fox News. The station that originally started this campaign as a catch-all for conservatives and Republicans has slowly shifted over time to to parroting the language and sentiment of Rush Limbaugh and the fringe right-wingers. So much so that even David Brooks has thrown in the towel and declared the station out of touch.

So what can we reasonably expect to see on the lower digit channel during the next four years?

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Brit Hume is so angry at the liberal media for implying, à la that Politico article yesterday, that just because a news source is admittedly left-leaning doesn't mean that McCain isn't losing.

Because the news is totally objective and if it's not, than it is lying to you! Well, no, there are some grey areas. As the old adage goes, even a broken Bill O'Reilly is right twice a day.

Although, according to Brit Hume's logic, everyone at his own station should lose their jobs:

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It's rare that a political blog will actually say something new and different. And to a certain extent, that's the point: any politics discourse is riddled with the same blunt repitition, dressed up in shiny new garbs, so by the time you find out how much the RNC paid for Sarah Palin's clothing, or who the hell is Bill Ayers, there is at least 300 different articles on the web debating the finer points of it. That's just the way political news, and to a larger extent, the news in general, works. It's new(s), and then by virtue of repitition/beating a dead horse, an hour later it's old. End of story.

But as rare as it is to see a new angle on a political blog, it's even more refreshing to see a metonymy for the whole liberal media during this campaign as presented by Politico this afternoon:

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Gone are the days of Hunter S. Thompson tagging along on Nixon's press plane just for a goof while covering the election for Rolling Stone. Now, only the most affluent publications can afford to send their most reputable reporters into the sordid muck of the campaign trail, where expenses can run in the range of $10,000 per week per person. And even then, what you're paying for is the chance to rub elbows with top campaign aides that remain inaccessible from the regular press folks who don't have enough time to thumb-reply a BlackBerry response to other muckrakers. Well, there's also the flow of high-end booze.

But in the age of Twitters and newspaper profit decline, as Howard Kurtz points out, the only type of campaign coverage that might still be worth the cost is the outsider, Gonzo journalism of old:

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D.C. gossip sheet Politico got all up in the New York Times derriere when, in reporting on MSNBC, Bill Carter failed to mention his newspaper's relationship with the network. (They've partnered for an irregular political roundtable show.) In scolding the Times, Politico's Michael Calderone then went on to realize his own employer has a partnership with CBS, which he's also failed to disclose.

Have Politico.com's plans for a TV show run aground? The paper-website combo, owned by Allbritton Communications and headed by ex-WaPo reporters Jim VandeHei and John Harris, was rumored to be scrounging together television talent with the hopes of launching a weekly gab fest a la Meet The Press and Fox News Sunday. But the whole project is now on hiatus, according to industry sheet FTVLive, leaving only a half dozen weekend news morning shows for Hillary Clinton to appear on.

Oh. Dear. Politico, the website that could, isn't content with having merely an online hub and print edition. Now they're trying to get themselves wrapped up in a Sunday morning political talk show, joining Meet The Press and its ilk in the war of booking "gets." So adept at plotting its own course, Politico TV show, however, shouldn't be that outside the norm. Expect a panel of the operation's experts going after the same big names Reliable Sources and everyone else does. Segments might be shorter than you're used to, but they'll also be just as gimmicky: "Turn the Tables" has guests asks questions of the hosts. "Top Tables" swaps out an office desk for a restaurant table as the set's centerpiece. Both are segments destined for the same afterlife where Katie Couric's freeSpeech lives on.