Nonlinear at CNN's 'The Situation Room'

Over at Wired, Xeni Jardin has a slightly gushing piece on the multimedia ideas and technology behind CNN's "The Situation Room" with Wolf Blitzer. But I think there's an interesting line from David Bohrman, the Washington bureau chief who is the brains behind much of the whiz-bang stuff:

For election night coverage in November 2004, the network rented out Nasdaq headquarters in New York, and displayed data on a wall of screens throughout the broadcast.

"It worked, and that taught us something about spatial display of information -- it's possible to do things that aren't linear," said Bohrman.

For a business so tied to its linear processes, this is a pretty heavy -- and welcome -- thought. I'll be interested to see where it leads.