Sometimes old dogs don’t need to learn new tricks.
As news organizations scramble for new ways to connect with readers and viewers, there is delicious irony in this fact: The “CBS Evening News,” anchored by a very old-school Bob Schieffer, is the only one of the big three evening news shows to pick up viewers this season.
Schieffer’s broadcast is still losing big time to ABC’s “World News Tonight” (No.2) and the “NBC Nightly News” (No.1.) But as of this month, Schieffer’s broadcast has picked up more than 140,000 viewers, and the other two have lost more than 1.6 million viewers since September.
Schieffer, here Wednesday for a lecture at the University of Denver, is clearly getting a kick out of it.
“These other people are enormously talented. Brian Williams is good and really is going to be terrific,” he said. “But the fact that I’ve been around for so long, maybe it’s people going back to something familiar.”
He’s also earning those numbers by delivering the news straight up: no blogging, no
webcasts. The longtime CBS Washington correspondent and host of “Face the Nation” says he’ll pass on the digital stuff because he already has “more work than a fellow 68 years old can do.”
He also notes that old-fashioned reporting is not getting any easier, as evidenced by the recent wounding of ABC co-anchor Bob Woodruff in Iraq. That incident demonstrates the enormous difficulty of reporting from Iraq, and Schieffer thinks there might be more attacks targeting journalists because the insurgents know that kind of story will get major play in the U.S.
“It’s caused all of us to rethink how we cover this,” he said. “I don’t think there’s any question the people who blew up that (vehicle) knew who was onboard.”
Schieffer, who spent time as a reporter in Vietnam, calls Iraq “the most difficult war that anyone had ever tried to cover. … Our people don’t go anywhere without armed guards, even inside the Green Zone. There is no place safe.”
His topic in Denver this week, where he will receive the Anvil of Freedom award from DU, will be the one weighing on most reporters’ minds these days: the future of the news business.
He’s pondered whether newspapers will be around in 10 years, or for that matter, cable television. While there are plenty of things we don’t know, he said, “What we do know is they are going to need news … so the role of the journalist is not going to change. What we don’t know is what the medium is going to be.”
As for his own future, Schieffer says he is looking forward to moving on from his interim stint as news anchor, which he took over a year ago after Dan Rather’s abrupt departure in the wake of “Memogate.” He is already on record endorsing the oft-rumored hiring of “The Today Show’s” Katie Couric.
In the meantime, he said, “It’s fun to do it, and I really think of myself as a sort of player-coach. This is baseball. You have to put them into the field and see if they can play. What I want by the end of this year – or whenever the decision is made for an anchor – is to have the best team in journalism.”
Given how he’s scoring against folks 20 years his junior, don’t bet against him.
Staff writer Edward P. Smith can be reached at 303-820-1767 or at esmith@denverpost.com.
Bob Schieffer
LECTURE | Schieffer’s lecture kicks off the DU School of Communications Summit; Cable Center, 2000 Buchtel Blvd.; 6 p.m., Wednesday | $150 | 303-871-3976 or soc.du.edu/summit
