The CBS Nighttime News
If you're the kind of person who sleeps soundly every night, never waking up and flipping on the TV in the wee hours of the morning, you probably consider yourself fairly lucky. But if you sound sleepers were to ask Bob Bicknell, he'll tell you you're missing out. Bicknell is the senior producer of "Up To The Minute," CBS' nighttime news broadcast, which bills itself as offering programming for "very late workers, very early workers, insomniacs, parents of insomniac infants, and anyone else in the growing Monday-through-Friday overnight audience."
"Up To The Minute" has been around since April 1, 1992, and it has maintained the 2 a.m. to 6 a.m. timeslot ever since. What was once a relatively large staff has been reduced to 9 people, who, Bicknell says, cover the network from 7:30 p.m. until roughly 4:30 a.m. The first UTTM staffer shows up at the CBS Broadcast Center in New York around 3:30 in the afternoon; the last departs around 5:00 a.m., unless news breaks, in which the staff stays later. Each night the staff produces a one-hour show, as well as eight-minute newsblocks at the top and bottom of every hour. The newsblocks are updated with fresh as a story develops, but if nothing changes between, say, 3 a.m. and 4 a.m., the blocks will be rerun.
It isn't easy to produce a one-hour show with just nine people, and, unlike most CBS News employees, UTTM staffers have to be multitaskers, writing their own material and editing tape themselves, because the staff is so small. "That's the way we have to get by," says Bicknell. In addition to its original programming, the show relies on content from other areas of CBS News, generally what producers consider the "best features" from shows like "Sunday Morning," "48 Hours," and "Face the Nation." Bicknell says UTTM is now moving away from recycled content, however, and points to original features like the "Letter From Asia." The broadcast won't soon be completely self-sufficient, but Bicknell says he's trying to feature more original content that can be fed to CBSNews.com and CBS affiliates.
Working at night can be difficult, Bicknell admits. "It's hard on the rest of your life. Most of us are married, and have young children." But he says there are some significant benefits. "We can spend a lot more time on something than other shows," he says. "We can take a story of the day and dedicate 7 minutes or so to an interview on that subject. We can go longer if we need to. We get to ask the questions that aren't being asked and answered because of time on some of the other broadcasts."
And there are reasons to be happy, he says, about flying relatively low on the radar screen. "There's not a lot of people walking around picking apart what it is we're doing," he says.
UTTM programming is available coast to coast, but whether or not you see it – and when – is up to the local CBS affiliate. For the last quarter of December, the show averaged just short of 800,000 viewers at any given time. Bicknell says the international audience is growing. "When it's 2 a.m. here it's 10 in the morning in Baghdad, and a lot of people watch it from there," he says.