En route to refashioning its evening newscast, CBS News is doing something right. A ratings upswing bears this out.
Although the “CBS Evening News With Bob Schieffer” lags in third place, for the season-to-date the CBS half-hour is the only network evening newscast to post gains in total viewers and households. (NBC News rules with 9.52 million viewers; ABC News follows with 8.49 million; CBS News has 7.22 million.)
The evolving CBS News casting is remarkable. Have you noticed? Some nights it looks like Bob Schieffer and the Schieffer Newsbabes.
They’re smart, tough and notably easy on the camera: Lara Logan, the news division’s swashbuckling star, is poised in frequent on-camera debriefings from Iraq with Schieffer.
A South African, Logan was the only journalist from an American network in Baghdad when American troops invaded the city. Now she’s comfortable giving her opinion on how things are going for the Iraqis. Logan was recently dubbed “the war zone ‘It Girl”‘ by The New York Times.
She joins Sheila MacVicar, erstwhile It Girl of ABC News, Thalia Assuras in Washington, D.C., Elizabeth Kaledin on the medical beat, Trish Regan on business news, Kimberly Dozier on Iraqi prisons and others. They make veteran reporters like national security correspondent David Martin look dull by comparison.
With a new boss – longtime “60 Minutes” producer Rome Hartman replaces Jim Murphy at the helm – the broadcast is poised to continue its roll. Good thing the suits didn’t knock Schieffer from his “temporary” anchor post after the Dan Rather transition.
Schieffer too is on a roll: His “Face the Nation” surged during the November sweep, coming closest to NBC’s reigning “Meet the Press” in 11 years.
Schieffer may not set the demographics on fire, and his hair can’t compete with Brian Williams’ on NBC, but he’s a trusted news quantity. That means more to viewers than the bean counters might think.
Meanwhile, at NBC News, they’ve got a new idea for reaching more (read: younger) audiences. “Blogging Baghdad” begins today, featuring video clips and blogs from Richard Engel in NBC’s Baghdad bureau.
NBC News president Steve Capus has said the online component is critical to extend the brand and increase the “transparency” in reporting. At a time when viewers are suspicious of journalists generally, news outlets must be as open as possible in revealing how they report.
While the network news divisions strive to remain relevant, some say they’ll have to do more than cast comely correspondents and launch blogs.
“They need to open up the news process in a way that is completely alien to how network news has operated in the past,” says Andrew Nachison, head of the Media Center, a think tank in Reston, Va. “Simply adding some blogs to what they do isn’t going to make them young and hip.”
Nachison says they will have to engage audiences in “a news-gathering conversation. They need to contemplate scrapping the nightly news as a concept and think about a 24-hour news audience.”
Viewers are not passive receivers of the “voice of God”-style newscasts. We are participants.
To succeed in the future, Nachison says, “The networks must tell audiences, ‘You’re going to help inform our understanding of the truth. You’re going to fact-check us and contribute new information our reporters didn’t uncover on their own.”‘
Not that network news must be re-created from scratch. But the new model will be “an open, collaborative somewhat messy process.”
A role remains for big media institutions. “News organizations are going to play what we call a ‘remediation’ role in connecting society, connecting people to information and to each other,” Nachison says.
The old model – “it’s news when we say it’s news” – is out. The new model turns the tables: Control flows up from the bottom. As Nachison sees it, the “individual now has unprecedented power over how, when and where they access and share information.”
In the meantime, Bob Schieffer and the Newsbabes look credible enough.
TV critic Joanne Ostrow can be reached at 303-820-1830 or jostrow@denverpost.com.
