The Evening News Report: When It's Time To Change Edition
But we're going to make an exception for what went down on Thursday, for two reasons. First, it signaled a change in the direction of the "Evening News," one that we think is worth discussing. And two, we've seen significant upheaval at CBS News in the brief life of Public Eye – a lot of people have come and gone in a way that has been hard on some of the people within the organization. And in the interests of transparency we didn't want to let that go unnoticed.
Rome Hartman, who until last week was the executive producer of the "Evening News," had a significant challenge on his hands when he took the job a year ago. He had to deal with a closely-watched new anchor, a third-place newscast hampered by its lead-ins, divergent opinions within and without the company about the best direction for the broadcast, and a mandate to move away from time-tested formulas.
Much of that hasn't changed, and Rick Kaplan, the new EP, faces many of the same challenges as his predecessor. But he is also dealing with a different playing field. The conventional wisdom is that Kaplan has been tasked with making the show less experimental and more like its competitors than it was under Hartman. "The hiring of television veteran Rick Kaplan to run the 'CBS Evening News' is a sign that the network wants to replace experimentation with a program its viewers can count on every day when they switch on Katie Couric," wrote the Associated Press' David Bauder.
His sentiment was echoed by many media watchers, and quotes like this, from CBS News President Sean McManus, back it up. "I think in some ways we owed it to the industry to try new things. But we found at 6:30 with only 22 minutes of programming time, people basically want you to tell them what happened in the world that day," said McManus. The long-dormant "freeSpeech" segment, one can say without much risk, is almost assuredly dead, and will likely not be replaced by anything quite so audacious.
Kaplan calls himself a "hard news guy," and another bit of conventional wisdom is that the broadcast will become more hard news-focused under him. Kaplan has been careful not to say as much, but Gail Shister and others have read between the lines> and come to that conclusion. It is probably fair to say that the collective hope at CBS is that the show does get "harder." But there remains a fair amount of skepticism within the organization about whether that will really happen.