Free Advice About The 'Evening News'

(CBS)

Summarize the news of the day in five minutes or so; figure that most people have heard it or read it anyway, and basically need reassurance they haven't missed anything. Don't waste time and resources to illustrate the same stories everyone has. Use anchors or featured reporters in New York, Washington, Los Angeles and London to do quick summaries. Use them to update the news throughout the evening, so people not living in the Eastern time zone aren't neglected.

Spend a big chunk of time--10 minutes or so--on covering one really good story; insist that your best reporters and cameramen and editors and graphics designers take the skills they now lavish on the magazine show/tabloid story of the day, and devote the same attention to telling and explaining stories that matter to people. From many angles and from different points of view, cover health care and education and money and religion and, yes, even foreign news. Do it right, and people will watch. And don't ignore steroids and Michael Jackson trials and movies and television and other parts of the popular culture, but don't do them unless you can go beyond the headlines everyone else has.

Give people even more to think about by ending with opinion. Not the usual suspects, but a full range. Why is Tucker Carlson relegated to a small cable audience? Why are the sensibilities of the Onion seen only on the Web and on piles of papers stacked on college campuses and a few city corners? Why not use animation and puppet caricatures to convey opinion? Why not allow Jon Stewart a weekly shot at the news on the news? And why, with all the talk about the Web and interactivity, is it so unusual to find "ordinary" citizens with something to say on television?