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Myopic Wall Street often uses a microscope when it should use a telescope. The rot at Web publisher CNET goes far beyond the particulars of one quarter. Forget the question of by how many cents per share it missed earnings expectations, and ask yourself this: Why isn't CNET gushing cash? Its established brands in tech news and reviews should be printing money. No wonder hedge fund Jana Partners is trying to unseat its board. I'm not sure Jana has any plan, other than throwing the boardroom rascals out. So what's the problem, and what to do?

I don't buy the theory promulgated by self-interested rivals that blogs are nibbling away at CNET; it has always had rivals, and its sites' traffic has continued to grow as the general interest in gadgetry rises.

But if you look at CNET's income statement, the story is simple: revenues are nearly flat, while costs have soared. For that, the most likely culprit is CNET's diversion into content areas like food and babies, in which it has no expertise and its advertisers have no interest. Trying to expand horizontally has been a fruitless distraction. Rolling up smaller blogs to expand the inventory its salespeople can sell — that would actually make sense. CNET's deal with Yahoo to license its tech content and cooperate on ad sales is a positive sign of management focus, but it smacks of being too little, too late. Selling everything outside CNET's core expertise and spending the proceeds on a rollup strategy would be the right move, but I'm not sure CNET CEO Neil Ashe is brash enough to do that.