Norah O’Donnell’s exit from “CBS Evening News” Thursday night wasn’t what viewers might have expected. And the successor program that CBS intends to air in its place on Monday will have a similar quality.
O’Donnell bid farewell to viewers of the long-running broadcast after a surprise taped cameo from Oprah Winfrey which celebrated the anchor and showed many highlights of her tenure. O’Donnell thanked the audience for welcoming “hard news with heart into your homes,” and was spotted being surrounded by colleagues and family as the show’s credits began to roll. Coming Monday: a completely overhauled edition of the program that is taking pains to break many visual ties to the days when Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather told the nation what was most important at the end of their day.
CBS will launch a new “Evening News” that relies on a group of co-anchors, rather than a single person. One of the goals is to imbue the national program with the look and sensibility of the local-news programs that viewers of CBS stations see across the U.S., a nod to the fact that local broadcasts tend to still have traction among audiences who are more prone to get their headlines and information from streaming and digital sources than in the past.
“CBS Evening News” has been stuck in third place behind ABC’s “World News Tonight” and NBC’s “NBC Nightly News” for years. O’Donnell didn’t change that, but give her this: The show last week won an average of 5.037 million viewers — a little higher than the program’s norm — amid big changes in the nation. And she’s never had her journalism questioned or a story that generated criticism of being unfair or inaccurate — despite several tough pieces that investigated sexual assault in the military. She also secured an interview with Pope Francis, not the easiest “get” in the business.
In her place, CBS will launch an “Evening News” led by John Dickerson and Maurice DuBois, with Quinn adding weather and Margaret Brennan adding to her duties as moderator of “Face The Nation” on hand to offer perspective on Washington and politics. The new format will help accomplish a goal touted for months by senior CBS and Paramount Global executives: bringing together the news teams of CBS News and the CBS local stations. The maneuver takes place as Paramount is under extreme pressure to cut millions of dollars from its operating costs. More are expected to take place once the company is acquired by Skydance Media, expected, at present, at some point later this year. Viewers of the new “Evening News” probably won’t see Dickerson and DuBois out in the field all that much, a duty that will increasingly be handled by a correspondent who covers the area in which an important news story breaks.