Christy Tanner, one of CBS News’ top streaming executives, is leaving the company after eight years. Tanner announced her exit Thursday morning. Tanner, who joined CBS News during the advent of the streaming era, is one of the architects of CBSN, the company’s free streaming news channel. In her role as executive vice president and general manager of CBS News Digital, Tanner oversaw CBS News across all digital platforms, including CBSNews.com. Tanner is the latest high-ranking female executive to leave ViacomCBS in the last few months.
After two years on 60 Minutes, CBS News correspondent John Dickerson is shifting the focus of his political analysis and national affairs reporting to CBS Sunday Morning and other broadcasts. He’s also developing a series for Paramount+.
The two executives named to head a newly fashioned division that combines the CBS local stations with CBS News and the team that manages the CBSN live-streaming news service offered their early vision for how the operation will function. Both Wendy McMahon and Neeraj Khemlani suggested in their first outreach to staffers that the company’s ultimate product will combine the national and overseas heft of CBS News with feet on the ground in various cities where CBS operates.
Exclusives
CBS is throwing the full weight of its news division behind the topic of climate change with the launch of its new initiative Eye on Earth: Our Planet in Peril ahead of Earth Day. The division-wide initiative debuts on Monday and will be featured on all CBS News broadcasts and platforms, CBS Television Stations and CBS News Digital.
Neeraj Khemlani, a former journalist who has worked at Hearst Newspapers for 12 years, and Wendy McMahon, who was head of ABC-owned stations, will be co-presidents of CBS News, the network said on Thursday. The move comes a day after CBS News President Susan Zirinsky told staff members that she was stepping down after two years on the job.
CBS News President Susan Zirinsky is nearing a deal to step down after just two years in the role and sign a wide-ranging production partnership with parent company ViacomCBS, according to people familiar with the matter. A search for a successor to Zirinsky has been ongoing for several months but a candidate has yet to be named. It is expected that she will remain as head of CBS News until then, the people said.
CBS News veteran Kim Godwin is expected to become the next president of ABC News, a move that would make her the first Black executive to lead a broadcast-network news division in the U.S. Godwin has had an offer from Disney’s ABC for several weeks, according to a person familiar with the matter, but only in the last few days did CBS CEO George Cheeks agree to let the executive out of her contract.
A segment on CBS Sunday Morning featured criticism of an interview airing on the company’s streaming service Paramount+.
Three years ago this month, Margaret Brennan was named moderator of Face the Nation. The CBS public-affairs program is in a favorable spot, finishing 2020 with an average of a Sunday-best 3,598,000 million total viewers. The show tallied a whopping 4.5 million viewers on Jan. 10, as viewers looked for Brennan’s take on the Capitol invasion. She has had a front-row seat for the torrid pace at which the news cycle now moves. “It’s been such a whirlwind,” Brennan said. “I think it’s been 10 years of news packed into three years of moderating.”
This Saturday-morning news show is supposed to look like the ones that precede it Monday through Friday. It doesn’t. “What I really want to do is continue down the path of identifying this show as a unique broadcast that is unlike anything else at CBS News,’ says Executive Producer Brian Applegate.
“Ticking Clock: Behind the Scenes at 60 Minutes,” by Ira Rosen (St. Martin’s Press) Long-time multi-award winning producer Ira Rosen has written a sometimes sad, often funny, always revealing portrait […]
ViacomCBS is reviving a streaming version of the newsmagazine 60 Minutes, hoping the series can draw viewers to its new online service Paramount+, according to people familiar with the situation. The company had created a spinoff of the show called 60 in 6 for the short-lived Quibi, but it was left in limbo when the streaming startup announced plans to close down in October.
Three of CBS News’ top Washington-based journalists—Nancy Cordes, Ed O’Keefe, and Weijia Jiang—are getting new roles at the network. Cordes (center), who has covered Capitol Hill for 12 years at CBS News, has been named chief White House correspondent. O’Keefe and Jiang become senior White House correspondents.
From the ongoing COVID-19 global pandemic and George Floyd protests around the world to the contested 2020 presidential election and last week’s storming of the U.S. Capitol by insurgents, O’Donnell says “journalism is more important than ever. There’s a thirst for information because there’s so much going on in the world.”
Shawna Thomas, a veteran of upstart journalism efforts like Vice and Quibi as well as mainstays like NBC News’ Meet the Press, will take the reins of CBS This Morning, filling a role that has been empty for months. Thomas has logged hours working as a Capitol Hill producer and also covering President Barack Obama. She spent a decade at NBC News before moving to Vice News, where she spent three years as its Washington bureau chief.
CBS’s pioneering newsmagazine is consistently one of the most-watched programs on television and its viewership is up 9% over last year, Nielsen said. That’s more than any other primetime program on ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox, and also one of only four to show a year-to-year increase.
One of the most revered producers in 60 Minutes history, Bob Anderson is calling it a career. Over his 30 years at the newsmagazine, Anderson has produced more than 180 stories, with his final one airing this past Sunday — an investigation of Saudi citizens escaping American justice.
CBS This Morning could get a new sunrise perch. CBS is contemplating a move that could harness a cavernous studio facility in the New York headquarters of its corporate parent, ViacomCBS, for use by CBS News — in particular its a.m. program. The studio offers panoramic views of Times Square, was once used as a base for the legendary MTV program TRL, and can be seen from the windows of the New York building that houses ABC morning rival Good Morning America.
CBS News will broadcast its multiplatform election night coverage from a newly built set in the Viacom CBS headquarters in New York’s Times Square, featuring advanced augmented-reality-style graphics and visual displays showing the latest data, polling and mapping. Anchoring from the studio will be Norah O’Donnell, Gayle King, Margaret Brennan, John Dickerson and Ed O’Keefe.
CBS News has renewed its longstanding content licensing agreement with Veritone, the creator of the operating system for artificial intelligence, aiWARE, and provider of digital content licensing services on behalf of […]
Donald Trump’s contentious interview with veteran 60 Minutes host Lesley Stahl, as well as Joe Biden’s less eventful sit-down, scored the show its largest audience since 2018. The dual Biden and Trump interviews, the latter of which the president cut short, drew a total of 16.8 million total viewers on CBS and scored a 2.4 rating among adults 18-49, per Nielsen time adjusted fast national numbers.
Lesley Stahl told President Trump up front: “You know, this is 60 Minutes. And we can’t put on things we can’t verify.” On Sunday night, the show remained true to its word. The venerable CBS newsmagazine aired significant portions of the interview it conducted with President Trump earlier this week, even though the White House broke an agreement that a tape it made of the proceedings would only be used for archival material.
Lesley Stahl’s interview with President Donald Trump will air Sunday on 60 Minutes, despite the White House’s decision to air unedited footage of it on Facebook, CBS News said Thursday.
