CBS’s Rhodes: On-Air, Online News Is Strong

CBS News is getting higher prices for advertising opportunities on its digital offerings than it gets for broadcast news content, CBS News President David Rhodes said Monday at TVNewsCheck’s annual NewsTECHForum in New York.

“The pricing that we’re receiving for the advertising we’re selling on [CBS News’ digital] platforms, because they are to this point ad-supported, is very strong and, in fact, is more than two [times] what we’re receiving for our overall average broadcast news offering,” Rhodes told TVNewsCheck Editor Harry Jessell, who interviewed Rhodes in a keynote session that opened the two-day conference.

“That’s counter-intuitive when you think about [analogies that are] made to other kinds of news presentation, where you think that when something goes digital it gets cheaper,” Rhodes said. “When our offering has gone digital, it actually has become more expensive. We’re very proud of that and it shows the potential to scale up not just the audience but the monetization of the platform.”

The digital platform the two focused on mostly was CBSN, the 24-hour live-streaming Internet news channel CBS launched in November 2014. Noting that CBS O&Os are contributing video packages to the service, Jessell asked Rhodes if non-CBS-owned affiliates would have the same opportunity. Rhodes’ answer indicated the network is aware of affiliate interest, but is undecided on the question of whether more local content, from non-CBS-owned stations, is the right direction for the service to go in.

“There is a great deal of affiliate interest in the platform,” Rhodes acknowledged. “And we’re hoping that some of the things we learn about it on a national or even on an international scale are lessons that could be applied locally.

“A big part of our core broadcast offering is that it’s got local integration in it. It’s one of the main value propositions that we have over national cable news, for instance,” he said.

And he noted that “the whole idea was that there could, over time, be an important local component.” But, he added, “at the same time, the audience that we’re reaching is not localized …. And while I think there [can be] local integration opportunities over time, it’s not what we think people are coming in for. They’re coming in for the big stories — in recent weeks, San Bernardino [and] Paris among them.”

On the other hand, where VOD content on the site is concerned, Rhodes said he thinks local content from affiliate stations might “keep” visitors on the site after they’ve clicked on the top national and international stories. “A lot of what might keep them and might generate more ‘dwell time’ and more clicks is local content,” Rhodes said.

Not surprisingly, Rhodes is just as bullish on traditional broadcast news as he is on his news division’s forays into digital. He noted that The CBS Evening News with Scott Pelley had its largest November audience in nine years last month. And Rhodes also expressed satisfaction in the steady audience growth of CBS This Morning in recent years too.

“We’re finding it’s a very strong business to be in right now,” Rhodes said of morning TV.

Asked about the continuing challenge facing traditional evening newscasts to attract younger viewers, Rhodes said it’s not as important as people think. To survive and be successful, network newscasts don’t necessarily have to attract young people, and they never really have, he pointed out.

“The existential question that we’re all facing is not, How is a network news broadcast going to reach more 19 year-old men? Because honestly, reaching 19 year-old men was never essential to the financial success of a network news operation,” Rhodes said. “The existential question is: As those people age into the cohort that more reliably has watched over-the-air broadcast news content, are they going to be there for us when they’re in their 40s and 50s and still in the news demo?”

Rhodes said the core values and mission of CBS News are strong and the division is operating in the black. “We need to make money,” he said. More to the point, he added, “We need to not lose money.”

“Our daily operation is about broadcast journalism and video newsgathering and production. We have a large organization that’s set up around doing that activity globally in a high-quality way,” he said. “We have a variety of ways of monetizing that activity.”

“In those areas, we are more successful today than we were last year [and] more successful today than we have been, in some cases, in five, 10 even 20 years,” Rhodes said.

Read all of our NewsTECHForum 2015 coverage here.