10 Plus 1: "Z" Is For Zoom

The military used to say, join the Navy and see the world.

(CBS)

So, what do you do for a living?

Right now I'm the executive producer of "48 Hours Mystery." I work with an incredibly talented group of correspondents, producers, seniors and support staff to produce one of the most unique shows on television. I call our show a "reality drama." Our focus is on the law and order kind of stories that are about ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. We look to true crime stories that can take the viewer through the legal system.

Often we try to uncover cases that no one has heard about and look at how a crime is solved from the first clue to the jury's decision. When there's a high profile case we often wait until the frenzy has passed. We go on months later, taking a fresh set of eyes into a story that has been well covered. The Elizabeth Smart story is an example. We went in 6 months after it happened. We were able to get access for the first time to all her siblings, which proved very powerful. Our staff is so strong that much of my job is to step back and look at the wide shot. What else could we be covering? What stories should we take on? That's a big part of my responsibilities. I try and find ways to tell those stories in non-traditional ways -- for example, we assembled a mock jury to hear the evidence the real jury heard in the Scott Peterson murder case. The results were fascinating.

As the executive producer it's my responsibility to green light all the stories we decide to take on. I work with our senior staff in talking through the merits of each and every story. There are many stories that are pitched that are great in print but could not sustain an hour of prime time. I work with the senior producer and the individual producer-associate producer teams before, during and after they shoot the stories. The senior assigned to each hour keeps me on top of developments in the field until the story is wrapped. Before editing begins there are philosophical discussions about how the stories will unfold. I listen to the people who have been there in the field, who have seen it, smelled it and tasted it. Their instincts are usually right -- unless they're not -- and then I'm right some of the time!

The process is painstaking for an hour each week. A melding of the best talents -- the correspondents, producers, associate producers, camera people, editors, directors and post-production staff -- all collaborating to give each week's broadcast the unique look and feel that separate us from traditional news magazines. We work for the news division, but make no mistake about it: we compete in the prime time arena. We compete against reality and drama and movies and sports. I like to say I've been to war, but prime time is hell.

My other role at CBS, along with my colleagues at 48 Hours, is that of the "go-to team" for the CBS and other Viacom entities. We are the prime time special events unit for CBS News. It's a role we are proud of. If there is breaking news of national importance we will often suggest we do a prime time special. We have launched as late as 6PM for a 9PM special, or sometimes, if we're lucky, we might have a day or two to prepare.

This year I, along with my colleagues, have ventured into new territory. We produced a program called "Elvis By The Presleys" for CBS entertainment. Working with an outside production group and Priscilla and Lisa Marie Presley, we had unprecedented access to never-before released music and the family archives of home movies and stills. Then there was Britney. Dawn Ostroff of UPN approached us to put together a 5 episode reality series. Our turnaround time? Just 3 weeks. "48 Hours" came together with a smart, small staff and went at it. Our first reality series. It was exciting -- it stretched our creativity -- and I loved every minute of it.

Perhaps the most powerful additional outside project is one that I pitched to Showtime. "48 Hours" did a very strong hour on Beslan -- the Russian school taken over by terrorists who held the students and teachers hostage for 3 days in September 2004. The "48 Hours" team was top notch. The hour was stellar, but we always felt it deserved to be seen by a wider audience. I, along with a senior colleague, pitched Showtime Network a new version of the broadcast, making it more a long-form documentary movie. They loved the idea. We traveled back to Russia, shot additional footage. It was quite a coup to get award-winning actress Julia Roberts to agree to narrate this film. Showtime submitted the film into the 2006 Sundance Film Festival. Showtime will air "Three Days In September" in early 2006.

My job is a creative facilitator. I spent two decades of my life on the road as a producer, traveling all over the world doing hard news, features and live events. I understand what it takes to put a story together. I understand the complexities of convincing people to share their moments of terror and pain. I know how hard the jobs are in the field and I see my job as a constant light to help guide our incredibly talented staff.

We as a network know the difficulties in not having a 24/7 open mic to the American people. We live in a world of unique programs designed to inform and explain the world in which we live. Ours is a tough job, in that we have make decisions of what to cover based on the limited time allotted to each broadcast. But there is another factor. Executives like myself are often in the tough position of trying to determine what an audience will watch in prime time. For me I often feel that there isn't enough coverage about the plight of those in this country who aren't making it. There are inequities that exist in every city in every state ... the people who live in this country who have no voice. There are large parts of our society that are simply left behind. Why is that? Is it not possible to help change the course of these American lives? If more air time were given to some of these people and their stories would it make a difference?

I've been blessed -- in traveling all over the country and the world I've encountered many strange situations and amusing moments. Here are but a few of the strangest.

The Yeltsin incident: CBS News was doing a documentary called "Seven Days in May" about the dramatic changes in the Soviet Union. The most important Soviet official to appear in this broadcast was to be Boris Yeltsin. It was my job to secure the interview for CBS. It was a very delicate negotiation. Yeltsin was the head of the Communist Party in Moscow -- he had not yet ascended to the presidency but he was the most dynamic Soviet leader and was leading the charge for reform in the Soviet Union. There I was in the Kremlin for two hours trying -– really trying -- to get him to say yes. It would be the first western television interview he had ever given.

We were in his office in the Kremlin. It was majestic -- gilded walls, mirrors everywhere, fireplaces, 20-foot-high ceilings, magnificent art. Jonathan Sanders, then a consultant to CBS, was acting as my translator. Yeltsin had his own translator. Finally, I'm about to waive the white flag and declare defeat when I remembered something. I said "excuse me" and walked to the end of the room where my backpack was. I reached in and pulled out an 8x10 glossy color picture of Diane Sawyer. She was still at CBS then. I walked across the enormous room -- the size of a football field -- and stood in front of Yeltsin at his desk, and I slammed the picture of a beautiful Diane Sawyer down in front of him. I said "this is who will be doing the interview for CBS." Yeltsin stopped -- his entire face flushed a bright red. A smile came across his face. He looked up at me and said, "Da interview arranged!"

Race To The Finish: When Jimmy Carter was president he loved to jog. In fact, he even decided he would test his mettle and run in a 10K race in the mountains of Maryland adjacent to the presidential retreat Camp David. Of course the White House press corps insisted on covering this event. There was no crew running alongside, but the press was positioned by the White House press office in some strategic locations for the network crews to capture the president running past. I decided on my own, along with my husband Joe Peyronnin, a CBS News executive at the time, to enter the race and try to stay as close to the President as we could. It was not an easy race, although I had been running for years. It was all hills -- mostly up hills. I wore my White House press pass -- a credential that was in essence a secret service clearance badge. I thought it might be helpful.

The race started and I thought, "I can do this." I looked over at the president who was running alongside his personal physician Dr. Lukash and several secret service agents I knew. I stayed back a bit but tried to keep up. President Carter came out of the gate so fast I got left in the dust. He made one fatal mistake -- he began shaking hands and chatting with the other runners. Carter lost focus in running the race.

I finally lost sight of the president. My husband had fallen behind me. Just a few miles into the race I rounded the corner and saw a commotion. I turned and saw the president of the United States ashen and collapsing into the arms of his doctor. As I looked up I thought he was having a heart attack and dying before my very eyes. As I looked up I saw the network crews about 75 yards further down the road. I could see the CBS crew. I screamed at the top of my lungs to roll tape, in case they couldn't make out what was happening. Secret service vehicles appeared from nowhere, the president was loaded into a car, and they sped off. I ran to the crew and they said they saw something happening and rolled but couldn't quite make it out. The crew had no vehicle as they had been dropped there by the White House Press Office, so the chance of getting them down the mountain quickly was not an option. Their walkie talkies weren't working well in the mountains so there was no talking to anyone. Hard to believe cell phones were just not available.

My fear was that the president was dead, and I had to get these tapes down the mountain. By this time my husband had caught up. I briefed him and, as a network news executive, he wanted to get down the mountain fast to get the tape fed back to Washington. The only way down, I told him, is running. I took the tape and ran with my husband as fast as we could. I kept repeating the details of what I saw so I wouldn't forget a single fragment. It was six miles to the end. Carrying the cassette in my hands we made it to the bottom and rushed to find the CBS team there to cover the finish line. White House correspondent Bob Pierpoint was there and with our second crew. They began interviewing me so my description of what happened would be on tape. Soon after there were cameras from every network taping. The president survived, of course -- so did I -- but it was my first appearance on the CBS Weekend News.

I would have to say it's a toss up. My nominations are Chris Everson, a remarkably gifted cameraman from South Africa who I have been to more wars with than I care to remember. He has an uncanny instinct to smell trouble before it comes over the hill, and knows how to talk to any soldier pointing a gun at you in any language. The close second is Mario DeCarvalho -- a cameraman and charmer who is based now in Atlanta but who hails from Portugal. Mario has the eye and the gift of persuasion. There isn't a war zone that he has been to that ever fully recovered from his having been there.

I would have been a surgeon or a movie director.

The last three weeks have brought some dramatic changes at CBS News, don't you think? We are the beginning of the next phase of our lives -- the new era of CBS News is about to begin. We are more than ready to march bravely into the future.

I began working at CBS News two weeks after the Watergate break in. I watched as a presidency crumbled under the pressure of being held accountable by the working press. CBS News had a responsibility. Our job was important -- it was our mission to keep the American people informed about what was happening in Washington, the country and the world. It was our job to give the context and perspective to the complexities of the world we lived in. The most dramatic changes in our industry began with the birth of cable news and the arrival of the internet. News was everywhere -- cable offered a 24/7 option of news when the audience wanted it. The growth of the Internet made news available to anyone with a computer. Here we are now -- 2005 -- and you can learn anything on any device that can be watched, listened to or talked on. We live in a blizzard of information and it's fantastic. But -- there's a but! -- CBS News is no longer one of the sole proprietors of information. The monopoly is long dead. We at CBS News are in the most important period of our lives. We have to re-focus and find our place in the world that is relevant and important to the audience we serve.

Books -- "The Year of Magical Thinking," by Joan Didion; "The Lost Daughters of China" by Karin Evans and "Boys Will Put You on a Pedestal (So They Can Look Up Your Skirt)" by Philip Van Munching. Movies (with my 9-year-old) -- "March of the Penguins," Harry Potter's latest and "Beauty Shop"

I have two very distinct memories. One was the night President John F. Kennedy went on television to talk about the Cuban missile crisis. We were forbidden from watching television during the week but on this occasion my father brought the TV into the dining room. I remember watching and after the speech Walter Cronkite came on and talked about what the president had discussed. My family talked about the real fear about "what if."

The other memory was on a Saturday in 1963. I was sitting crossed legged in front of our television and right before my eyes I saw Jack Ruby shoot Lee Harvey Oswald. I screamed into the dining room and said, "they just shot Lee Harvey Oswald." My mother said that's impossible, but I kept screaming and my entire family rushed in and stood in shock as the events unfolded before our eyes.

My daughter is 9 years old and has a mind of her own. Before she left preschool she was asked to draw a picture of herself and what she wanted to do in life -- after all this was a New York school, and she was heading into that inspirational year of kindergarten. Zoey did a life-size drawing of herself and underneath it she wrote: "When I grow up I want to work at CBS News with my mom and help produce the news." As we like to say in the business: only time will tell.

Often the most interesting person you cover has nothing to do with their station in life. In covering the White House for many years and working for CBS' Washington bureau I got to meet many presidents, each fascinating in their own right. Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George Bush, Bill Clinton. But often it was the unique person trying to fight a battle on their own who had the most impact on me. In China, CBS had decided to cover the visit of Soviet Leader Mikhail Gorbachev. It was the first time in 30 years a Russian leader had visited. We went in early to plan the coverage. I met a man, a professor, through an American academic in China who was helping us get our brains around the country. The year was 1989. Fang Li Zhi was a wealth of knowledge. He talked to us about the people, stories we should look at, human rights. I remember his doorbell was a mini symphony; it made me laugh that a leading intellectual would like this quirky piece of hardware.

Fang was enormously helpful with introductions, ideas -- he was so connected. He knew who to call, what to read. But beyond helping us I saw one man trying to give birth to new ideas, free thinking within the intellectual community in Beijing. He was amazing. Students would gather at his house to talk, discuss ideas -- he would challenge them, encourage them to think for themselves. He was a one-man revolution, single-handedly trying to change the course of history in China one mind at time.

Then a noted Chinese leader, who was one of the more progressive men, died, and the demonstrations of mourning soon turned to something else. Suddenly the death of this one man made the young people of Beijing confront the issues that had been boiling under the surface. Students began marching not in mourning but in protest of the way things were in China. The lack of free will, the lack of being able to decide what you would do for a living. They were in fact looking for a more democratic way of life. No one could have anticipated these marches would lead to a dramatic occupation of Beijing's central area Tiananmen Square. No one would have imagined the massacre that would occur when the Chinese government felt the only way to turn things around was to kill the students occupying the square. It was chaos. Martial Law was declared, no one would talk to us, the government was rounding up people they thought were behind the movement. I got an urgent call from a friend telling me the government was after Fang and they were en-route to our hotel. They made it through the lobby to our rooms. Fang had been told the government believed he was a major player instigating the students.

I, along with a few of my CBS colleagues, made a decision that we would take Fang in and hide him for a few days. It was dangerous -- we knew it. When the Chinese police made their presence very obvious in our halls we knew the situation was dire. I called a CIA contact at the United States Embassy and said there was something we needed to drop off. I was talking in code and he had no clue what I was talking about. We had to get Fang out of there -- for his safety and our own. A translator working for CBS took Fang over to the U.S. Embassy -- I never knew quite how they took him in -- but indeed they accepted "our package" and Fang was kept at the embassy for more than year. The United States then decided to give him asylum and he is alive and well and prospering in the United States. He is indeed one of the most interesting people I have covered.

Jerks: There have been many, but I'm of the opinion that a jerks are people under pressure who are insecure about their jobs and so get them out of the situation they're in and they won't be a jerk anymore.

"48 Hours" invented a genre of television that in its day was revolutionary. They were pioneers. The broadcast was an experimental program that spent two days in the life of someone, some group, some event. It was inspiring. The audience was taken on a journey. The strength of the show was the ability to tell stories as they unfolded, through the experiences of compelling characters. After about seven or eight years, the audience was looking for more -- more than anyone could deliver in just two days on a story. So the clock was extended, if not stopped. There was more competition -- a lot of competition. There was a period where the show changed direction.

We tired many variations, including multi-topic formats like our competitors. It simply wasn't working. We went back to a single topic for the hour -- that felt better. We did investigations -- that felt better yet. We began covering some extraordinary crimes and mysteries and suddenly the kind of storytelling that we are so good at seemed to be our destiny. The audiences responded. The more legal action we gave the audience the more they were responding. We of course still jumped on major news events with prime-time specials but for the week in and week out distinctive style of storytelling we found the crime and punishment beat endlessly fascinating.

The title didn't quite fit -- but the unique ability to tell story was still very much there. We remain a broadcast that is about real life drama. We never lost our roots. We often discussed the potential of changing the title. Ultimately, we felt that the history and identity of the name was worth keeping -- even if it didn't really address what we had evolved into. "48 Hours" is the third longest running show on television.