of broadcasts ? I mean, everything else is human interest
nothings and
who needs it ? Yet the networks wonder why they continue
to loose viewers ?
With a new round of layoffs expected this fall, CBS
News is being trimmed to the bone. Rebecca Dana on the
dramatic drop in ratings, strange BlackBerry blackouts, and
eager suitors for anchor Katie Couric.
On Monday, Katie Couric begins her fifth, and quite
possibly final, year of hard labor as anchor of the CBS
Evening News.
However she chooses to mark the
occasion, it will no doubt be more subdued than the
tears, dancing,
and $10 million
promotional campaign that attended her debut
on Sept. 5, 2006.
Four years and a reported $60 million later, Couric now
sits atop a news division that is in many ways
unrecognizable as the one-time home of Walter Cronkite—or
even the deep-pocketed, star-struck company that lured
Couric to Cronkite’s vacant chair with promises of wealth,
fame, and a place in history.
In the intervening years, Couric
has achieved all those things. She’s accumulated prizes for
her work and thrown herself into tweeting, blogging,
and anchoring special broadcasts on CBSNews.com. It hasn’t
always been a smooth road. After a strong start, the CBS
Evening News ratings dropped dramatically in the early
years of her tenure, culminating in talks between her agent
and CBS executives about the anchor leaving before the end
of her contract.
But Couric rebounded during the 2008 presidential campaign,
securing her place at the network and in history books with
a series of triumphant interviews with vice presidential
candidate Sarah Palin. In 2008 and 2009, the CBS Evening
News won the Edward R. Murrow award for best newscast.
But even as Couric and her team racked up plaudits, CBS
News has withered. Layoffs and cutbacks, the most recent in
February, have trimmed the division close to the bone, and
according to senior staffers, another round is coming this
fall. The network’s two premier daily broadcasts, Couric’s Evening
News and the CBS Early Show, are recording
particularly dismal ratings this summer.
“These are tough times for everyone,” Couric said in a
statement provided through her spokesman, “but I for one am
proud to be working with so many talented, dedicated people
who continue to work hard to maintain the highest
journalistic standards that have always been associated with
CBS News.”
In the last two weeks, the CBS
Evening News has drawn just 4.89 million viewers on
average, the lowest ratings recorded in the 20 years Nielsen Media
Research has been keeping track. During the
first of those two weeks, Couric traveled to Afghanistan and
landed an exclusive interview with Gen. David Petraeus,
among others. The CBS Early Show has logged around
2.2 million viewers on average this summer, less than half
the ratings of NBC’s Today.
One person described the atmosphere inside the network as
“sepulchral.”
The entire news business has contracted in recent years, as
viewers and readers have fled, depending on their age,
either to the Internet or to retirement homes. Advertising
dried up in the recession, devastating both local and
national newspapers and television broadcasts. It hasn’t
been pretty anywhere, but it’s been particularly rough for
CBS.
The Tiffany network began this latest period of attrition
at a considerable disadvantage. It has by far the weakest
station group, meaning its news broadcasts reach the fewest
number of potential viewers and commonly have the
lowest-rated local news lead-ins in the largest markets in
the country. Couric inherited a third-place broadcast when
she joined the network, one recently marred by her
predecessor Dan Rather’s involvement in the problematic 60
Minutes II report on President Bush’s service in the
National Guard.
CBS has not been alone in making
brutal cuts. First-place NBC News lost a chunk of its staff
as part of the “NBC 2.0” reorganization in 2006 and has
implemented various other cost-saving measures since,
including an initiative to share newsgathering resources at
the station level with Fox. Second-place ABC News axed
around 300 staffers, or upward of 20 percent of its news
division, in February of this
year.
Around the same time, CBS announced
a round of layoffs that reduced the roughly 1,400-person
staff by nearly 100. A host of smaller snips came as well:
The person who handled ordering business cards vanished, and
staffers haven’t been able to get them since. Cell phone
services are blocked on company-provided BlackBerrys for
many producers, who are now encouraged to communicate by
text. The communication between CBS brass, including news
division president Sean McManus, and their staff has all but
vanished.
“There’s no email,” said one producer. “There is no sense
at all that you’re at a network.”
A CBS News spokesman said in a statement: “The facts are
that the CBS News Division was just nominated for more Emmys
than the other networks combined, that, in addition to the
important news we air every day, we continue to broadcast
enormously popular number 1 programs like 60 Minutes,
48 Hours and Sunday Morning, that Face
the Nation is closer to first place than it has been
in at least as many years as our records go back, that we
have the fastest growing online presence in CBSNews.com, and
that we have by far the most critically acclaimed and
successful radio news in the industry. Our audiences number
in the tens of millions every week. Those are the facts.
Anything else is water cooler gossip and empty speculation.
We are evolving and we are thriving.”
There is thriving and then there is surviving, though, and
while CBS News may be amassing awards, financially, the
division is scraping by. One redress has been layoffs; the
latest round is expected to be smaller than the last, and
the most popular programs, including 60 Minutes and
48 Hours, are expected to get a pass.
Another cost-saving plan, looming
for years, has focused on somehow merging CBS News with CNN.
One source called this “the inevitability that never
happened.” Another, high up in the CBS ranks, said it is
extremely unlikely ever to, given enormous obstacles
contained within the network’s union and affiliate group
contract.
But whereas CBS is stuck with itself going forward, Couric
isn’t stuck anywhere. A number of carefully stacked dominoes
will determine her next move: whether Comcast chooses to
keep her old producing partner Jeff Zucker, now president
and CEO of NBC Universal, who might be in a position to
reinstall her in her old spot on Today, provided
Meredith Vieira doesn’t extend her contract beyond a year.
Or whether Piers Morgan hammers out a contract to take over
Larry King’s time slot at Time Warner’s CNN, which had long
been considered a good landing pad for Couric. And what CBS
offers her in terms of daytime or syndicated work, in place
of or in addition to her role on the evening news.
Back in May, Couric was honored for her career achievements
by the Museum of the Moving Image. All her potential suitors
were there, and NBC in particular came out in force, buying
a table and filling it with network bigs, including news
president Steve Capus. The TV news business may have all but
collapsed in the years since Couric gambled on history,
becoming the first solo female anchor of a broadcast network
newscast. But already, a familiar dynamic began to emerge.
On the red carpet at the St. Regis Hotel, Couric smiled for
the cameras, first with Time Warner chief executive Jeff
Bewkes, then with her old Today partner Matt Lauer.
In the pictures, it looks as if no time has passed at all.
