The CBS Evening News with Tony Dokoupil will be live Wednesday night from Eleven City Diner in Chicago's West Loop.

CBS News Chicago anchors Irika Sargent and Joe Donlon spoke with Dokoupil as he prepared for the broadcast in the Windy City, and for an interview with Mayor Brandon Johnson.

We asked him why, in his tour of 10 cities in 10 days, he chose to include Chicago.

"You cannot cover the country without covering Chicago, and getting to know Chicago is a big part of covering America," Dokoupil said. "Chicago is unavoidable."

We also asked him the same question we posed to Norah O'Donnell when she was anchoring CBS Evening News from Chicago during the 2024 Democratic National Convention: What does it mean to sit in that anchor's chair and put your stamp on the broadcast?

"This is the oldest 30 minute news broadcast on the air in America," Dokoupil said. "Nobody of significance in American life, virtually no body, has not been interviewed, covered, talked about on this program over the past 60 years. That is an immense inheritance of journalist. My goal is to take the low ebb on trust and begin to rebuild it for the next 60 years. We can grow the audience and not just see it dwindle as it has been for many, many years. We have to hit that head on."

"There is nothing honorable about sitting in this chair and turning the lights out in five years because we continue to trend downward, I want that trend to grow and we are putting all of our energy into making that happen," he continued.

CBS Evening News airs at 6:30 p.m. ET/5:30 p.m. CT on CBS Chicago.