Former CNN news anchor Aaron Brown (at left) returns to TV tonight on PBS' Wide Angle. I know this is happy news for many of you news junkies out there because in the nearly two years since Brown was pushed out of CNN's nightly line-up to make room for Anderson Cooper readers have not stopped asking about him. The last time we tried to catch up with Brown, he was still being paid and under contract to CNN and couldn't talk to us (or anyone else) about what had happened. "It wasn't anything I was going to lose sleep over," Brown told our writer Gayle Carter, who interviewed him recently for Who's News. "At some point you look at these things as a mathematical formula. They're paying me a lot and I'm not stupid. OK, I can live with this. It was sort of silly for a news organization to do that but they were paying for their thrills. So they thought, let's get something for our thrills, let's annoy him."

Brown, 59, says two stories  he missed covering during his "off" time were the primary campaign and the shootings at Virginia Tech in spring of last year. "I remember when (the shootings) happened. I had done a lot of those, especially at ABC, stories that are awful but always preventable. There's a breakdown in the system that can help kids who end up doing this." And the campaign: "Incredibly interesting. But, honestly, like everyone else I was wrong (in predicting the outcome). It would have been fun."

Brown has found a new calling since leaving CNN. He's teaching students at Arizona State University's Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. He doesn't claim to be an academic -- just someone who knows the business.  "I'm someone who likes to hold the newspaper but I have a 19-year-old daughter and she likes the news but she doesn't get that particular joy from actually holding it in her hand," he says. He says students tell him they can get the same news online, but he questions that. "Can you? Of course you can? Do you? I don't think so. People who read the news online, they don't get very deep into the paper. I even read things that I'm not interested in, like an opera review, but that's not how people use the Web." Brown says journalism students feel unsettled.  "Newspapers, TV, what is that going to mean? New media, they wonder how will they get paid? Amusing since they don't think they have to pay for content. What I believe is that storytelling is unchanged: a beginning, a middle, an end... good characters, good stories... The medium part is going to sort itself out, without my help. I tell them to learn to be a storyteller."

(photo courtesy pbs.org)