CBS News announced its big new internet strategy after hiring CBS Marketwatch founder Larry Kramer as the head. They invited a bunch of bloggers to the press announcement (but I couldn’t attend, being off in my mountain retreat).
Full disclosures (it’s a day for full disclosures): In their early stages of planning, I spoke with Kramer, CBS News President Andrew Heyward, and CBSNews.com editor Dick Meyer offering my two cents.
Features of the new CBS News strategy include:
: A new blog that will “create a candid and robust dialogue between CBS News journalists and the public — a move unprecedented among CBS’s peers in broadcast and cable television journalism.” It will “serve as the conduit between the public and CBS News to take viewers and users inside the news gathering, production and decision-making process via the use of original video and outtakes, interviews with correspondents and producers, and input from independent experts, among other methods.” It’s not an ombudsman; it’s not an anchor blogging; it is an effort to open up two-way communication with CBS’ audience about how CBS News makes its decisions.
They say it’s to be edited — not sure why they don’t say written — by Vaughn Ververs, the National Journal’s editor of The Hotline.
: A “cable bypass strategy” — which is to say that CBS News missed the cable train and so now it’s trying to catch the internet plane. So they will serve news directly to the internet. Broadcasting & Cable reports that this will include a video player called The EyeBox to show 25,000 news clips and an initiative to get TV staffers to feed news to the web 24 hours a day. Let’s hope they have more luck doing this than newspapers have had….
This is a response to many developments: missing out on cable… the growth of the internet as a primary means of delivering news… the shrinking (and aging and dying) of the network news audience… and, yes, l’affaire Rather. If they’d had that blog when the Rather scandal developed, we would have had a place to look for and demand their response and they would have had to have responded. Things might have turned out differently….
