Norah O’Donnell’s exit from “CBS Evening News” Thursday night wasn’t what viewers might have expected. And the successor program that CBS intends to air in its place on Monday will have a similar quality.
O’Donnell bid farewell to viewers of the long-running broadcast after a surprise taped cameo from Oprah Winfrey which celebrated the anchor and showed many highlights of her tenure. O’Donnell thanked the audience for welcoming “hard news with heart into your homes,” and was spotted being surrounded by colleagues and family as the show’s credits began to roll. Coming Monday: a completely overhauled edition of the program that is taking pains to break many visual ties to the days when Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather told the nation what was most important at the end of their day.
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CBS will launch a new “Evening News” that relies on a group of co-anchors, rather than a single person. One of the goals is to imbue the national program with the look and sensibility of the local-news programs that viewers of CBS stations see across the U.S., a nod to the fact that local broadcasts tend to still have traction among audiences who are more prone to get their headlines and information from streaming and digital sources than in the past.
Already, the similarities are evident. The graphics used on “CBS Evening News” Thursday evening looked just like those on display for the 6 p.m. broadcast of the local news from New York’s WCBS that preceded O’Donnell’s last round. During O’Donnell’s last broadcast, one segment centered on WCBS meteorologist Lonnie Quinn, who is slated to have a significant role in the new edition of the program.
“CBS Evening News” has been stuck in third place behind ABC’s “World News Tonight” and NBC’s “NBC Nightly News” for years. O’Donnell didn’t change that, but give her this: The show last week won an average of 5.037 million viewers — a little higher than the program’s norm — amid big changes in the nation. And she’s never had her journalism questioned or a story that generated criticism of being unfair or inaccurate — despite several tough pieces that investigated sexual assault in the military. She also secured an interview with Pope Francis, not the easiest “get” in the business.
In her place, CBS will launch an “Evening News” led by John Dickerson and Maurice DuBois, with Quinn adding weather and Margaret Brennan adding to her duties as moderator of “Face The Nation” on hand to offer perspective on Washington and politics. The new format will help accomplish a goal touted for months by senior CBS and Paramount Global executives: bringing together the news teams of CBS News and the CBS local stations. The maneuver takes place as Paramount is under extreme pressure to cut millions of dollars from its operating costs. More are expected to take place once the company is acquired by Skydance Media, expected, at present, at some point later this year. Viewers of the new “Evening News” probably won’t see Dickerson and DuBois out in the field all that much, a duty that will increasingly be handled by a correspondent who covers the area in which an important news story breaks.
Whether audiences will flock to it remains anyone’s guess.
The appeal of the evening news on any network comes from a desire for a reliable wrap of the day’s most important events and stories. The shows lack the hot-talk alarm of their cable-news counterparts, though in recent years, “Breaking News” chyrons have crept into the graphics mix with increasing frequency. The shows provide a stable haven for pharmaceutical advertisers, still one of the biggest supporters of linear TV. To be sure, the evening-news doesn’t lure young viewers like a “Squid Game” binge on Netflix might, but they still corral millions of people over the course of a single half hour. And maybe there’s a thrill of some sort from seeing a single host juggle politics, culture, stories from overseas and a little bit of pop culture all in less than thirty minutes.
The risk for CBS next week is that the viewers who tuned in to O’Donnell — and Jeff Glor, Anthony Mason, Scott Pelley, Katie Couric and Bob Schieffer before her — will expect more of the same, not something different.
O’Donnell has more work to do. She will take on senior correspondent duties that will have her working for big interviews and doing enterprise work that will land across CBS News platforms. At a moment when many of the nation’s big TV-news mainstays are under increasing financial pressure — both CNN and NBC News unveiled layoffs Thursday — she may have landed the better job.
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