CBS News Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss has unveiled her vision for the company in a town hall meeting with staffers on Tuesday.
During the event, she shared that she believes her role needs to include shifting the network’s mindset to more digital aspects.
“I am here to make CBS News fit for purpose in the 21st Century,” she said. “Our industry has changed more in the last decade that in the last 150 years, and the transformation isn’t over yet. Far from it. It’s almost impossible to conceive of how fast things will move from here.”
Weiss aadded by stating that honesty will be the best policy going forward. And admitting that it hasn’t lived up to its end of the bargain by producing enough credible news, in her view.
“We have to start by looking honestly at ourselves. We are not producing a product that enough people want,” she said. Weiss added that “We can blame demographics, or technology, or fractured attention spans, or ‘news avoidance,’ but these are all copes.”
She continued by stating that the falling trust in mainstream media is partly to blame. But she believes that legacy media organizations haven’t done a good enough job adapting to the current landscape.
“We are not doing enough to meet audiences where they are, so they are leaving us,” said Weiss. “They are not tuning out, far from it. In fact, Americans spend twice as much time consuming news today as they did 50 years ago. They are going to the vast universe of podcasts, and YouTube, and Twitch, and newsletters and, yes, sometimes to our nimbler competitors.”
An increased focus on “scoops” will be enacted under Weiss’ tutelage, she shared. “This is where we can soar, and where we’ll be investing,” she concluded.
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I hope Bari addresses the need to make sure that CBS remains in the center and reports all sides of any major issue.
It has become very difficult to find a US media outlet that reports the news more or less without bias in One Direction or another.
I do not want yet another US media outlet that makes me feel good or tells me What it thinks I like to hear.
I need CBS news to tell me the truth, even if that truth goes against my personal desires or preferences.