Tim Goodman aims at Anderson Cooper and defends the traditional NewsNight in today’s San Francisco Chronicle:

“CNN, looking to exploit the post-Katrina face of caring, personal, passionate, youthful, hip, modern and really good looking journalism, has now further marginalized Aaron Brown and nearly ruined Brown’s show, “News-Night,” by throwing Cooper into the mix.”

He calls it “yet another in a long line of terrible CNN decisions.” He says it’s “an upper-management tactic that has lessened “NewsNight” even more from the first ill-advised rejiggering of content, when it took Brown’s folksy-if-eccentric take on the news of the day and turned it into a kind of hybrid magazine show. Now it’s something else entirely, and it’s clear that something is a work in progress.

Result so far: It’s not working.”

> Update: 11:30am: “I agree with Goodman: Have Anderson do a 2-hour news/magazine block from 7-9, move Paula into a reformatted daytime schedule and have Aaron go alone for an hour at 10,” an e-mailer says. “CNN needs that “newscast of record” and it is sorely missed so long as Anderson co-anchors with Aaron.”