Anxiety Builds at CBS News Over Potential Moves by Skydance
Staffers at the unit, now part of Paramount Skydance, are worried about the potential for a new round of layoffs, according to three people familiar with the news division, and are also curious about a possible new chapter for 'CBS Evening News,' which has seen its ratings drop noticeably since embracing a new, atypical format.
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CBS News declined to make executives available for comment.
Layoffs are indeed possible. Executives from Skydance signaled earlier this month during a meeting with reporters that they intended to follow through on previously announced plans to cut $2 billion in costs from the company, which has suffered from longer-term downturns in traditional advertising and distribution revenue as one-time TV viewers embrace streaming technology. Jeff Shell, the new president of Skydance, indicated those cuts and reductions should be disclosed by the company's next quarterly report to investors in November.
As for 'CBS Evening News,' executives are poised to experiment with a tweak to the current format, which relies on two anchors delivering news side by side.
A person familiar with the matter suggests viewers will in weeks to come see a more frequent reliance on one of the anchors — John Dickerson and Maurice DuBois lead the program — being out on the road at major, breaking events. Just last week, Dickerson was on the ground in Alaska as U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin met to discuss Russia's ongoing battle with Ukraine. Making use of both anchors in such fashion would put an authoritative person in the field and the studio, this person suggested, while giving the newscast the ability to deliver breaking news at the top of the broadcast.
That suggests a new wrinkle in the show's mission. The original concept behind this 'Evening News' iteration was to emphasize more feature and enterprise reporting. In its earliest weeks, even CBS News' Washington bureau veterans tried to examine the effects of Trump-era policies on people in places like Baltimore or Canada. And yet, critics complained that the show was at times giving short shrift to breaking headlines.
The format tweak could potentially give 'Evening News' a shot of the latest headlines while still leaving some room for the distinct elements it brings to the mix.
Speculation on 'Evening News' has grown since the disclosure that its current executive producer, Guy Campanile, would leave the show and return to his former home, '60 Minutes,' where he has long worked as a producer. One of the concepts behind the new 'Evening News' was to adopt some of the spirit of '60,' which generates its own headlines by pursuing stories both tied to headlines and completely disconnected from them.
But evening-news audiences, accustomed to a format that has worn well for many decades, didn't bite. Approximately 3.74 million viewers watched 'CBS Evening News' for the five-day period ended August 4, according to Nielsen. ABC's 'World News Tonight,' which leads the category, captured an average of nearly 6.89 million, while NBC's 'NBC Nightly News' won an average of nearly 5.35 million.
CBS News executives had hoped their new 'Evening News' might pick up viewers as Tom Llamas picked up the reins at NBC following a decision by Lester Holt to step away from the 'Nightly' role. Instead, the CBS show has lost hundreds of thousands of viewers since moving away from the format that had been anchored by Norah O'Donnell.
One potential candidate to take the 'Evening News' reins behind the camera is said to be Kim Harvey, a veteran producer who has worked for CNN, Fox News Channel and MSNBC, along with CBS News. Harvey has logged time working on MSNBC town halls during the run up to the 2016 election, and with anchors that range from Rachel Maddow and Chris Hayes to Bill O'Reilly and Greta Van Susteren.
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