Marketwatch’s Jon Friedman….

As a media columnist, I get frequent emails from CNN, telling me every gory detail of the network’s ratings improvement.

I applaud the efforts of news chief Klein to make CNN look as newsy as possible. Klein disowns its previous incarnation — make that incarnations, as TV’s Car-chase News Network, Clinton News Network, not to mention the viewer’s “destination” (as TV people like to say) for coverage of burning buildings and the missing-white-woman du jour.

But primetime is different. During the day, the news is fresh. At night, though, a network has to show some imagination and give the public a genuine reason to watch its offerings.

It’s no coincidence that the three most durable presences on cable news are CNN’s own Larry King, MSNBC’s Chris Matthews and Fox’s Bill O’Reilly. Say what you will about any of them or the political bent of their employers.

The bottom line: These guys are entertaining, though each in his own idiosyncratic way. The key: all three create excitement for the audience. You tune in every night and are drawn to their shows to see who they’re interviewing. Clearly, they are the stars of their shows, not the guests.

Sorry, Jon Klein, but nobody else at CNN comes close to having that kind of drawing power for me. Aside from Larry King, none of your evening stars can give me a reason, night after night, to turn the channel away from a New York Knicks game or a movie on HBO.

They’re bland and polished and, sorry to say, anything but riveting. If you want to keep the attention of viewers like me, CNN needs more pizzazz.

Maybe Aaron Brown wasn’t The Answer. But if you ask me, CNN, you still haven’t found it.

The Seattle Times’ Kay McFadden…

Brown wasn’t mentioned anywhere — not even a “Thanks, and we wish him well in his future ventures.” It’s as if the man whose 9/11 coverage reverberated with viewers, and who brought a rare reflectiveness to cable’s choppy hubbub, had never existed.

All of which suggests that CNN is not even as classy as Triple A Portland, though its ratings make that an otherwise apt comparison. CNN has continued to struggle against first-place Fox News Channel in the second division of television news.

To be fair, the lag includes Brown’s show, which this year fell further behind time-slot opponent Greta Van Susteren on Fox.

Yet Brown’s failure to “pop” doesn’t quite support CNN/U.S. President Jon Klein’s explanation — once reporters called him — that he and Brown “mutually” agreed there just wasn’t a place on the new schedule.

The truth is, Brown’s job was shaky once Klein became CNN’s latest management solution. When Klein unveiled new plans for CNN to television critics last January, it was clear the charismatic Cooper and Blitzer’s “Situation Room” would lead the way.

Even at that, however, Brown, 56, who spent 15 years at KING-TV and KIRO-TV before joining ABC News and then CNN, didn’t exactly help his own cause.

He worked hard on “the smirk” — the tiny smile that tended to polarize viewers into fans or enemies. But he appeared reluctant to travel out of the studio, preferring the old-school anchor’s occupation of directing and helping explain the news that others filed.

Radar Online…

“I tried to hire Aaron Brown a couple of years ago when I was at Fox,” former CBS News president Van Gordon Sauter told us from California. “I think he’s articulate, insightful, and incredibly gracious. But in the absence of a well-produced show, his potential was never achieved. CNN failed to take his basic assets and enlarge them, make the show more energetic, more relevant, more spontaneous, more engaging. That’s what the show needed.”

Everyone who saw Cooper’s star-making on-camera retort to Mississippi senator Mary Landrieu in the wake of Hurricane Katrina (“Excuse me, senator, I’m sorry for interrupting. I haven’t heard that because, for the last four days, I’ve been seeing dead bodies in the streets here in Mississippi…. Do you get the anger that is out here?”) knows why CNN president Jon Klein is going with his silver-haired golden boy in the beleaguered network’s highest-profile news slot.

“This, for them, is a smart move—an isolated smart move,” Sauter says, adding, “I wish CNN well, but they’re just in dire shape.”