Bari Weiss Unveils Sweeping Vision: “I Am Here to Make CBS News Fit for Purpose in the 21st Century”

Bari Weiss Unveils Sweeping Vision: I Am Here to Make CBS News Fit for Purpose in the 21st Century

CBS News will undergo a radical transformation in the coming months, with editor-in-chief Bari Weiss outlining her vision at an all-hands meeting Tuesday morning. Weiss delivered a PowerPoint presentation that outlined her view on the state of media and how CBS can remain relevant in a challenging time for broadcast news. She also noted the…

CBS News will undergo a radical transformation in the coming months, with editor-in-chief Bari Weiss outlining her vision at an all-hands meeting Tuesday morning.

Weiss delivered a PowerPoint presentation that outlined her view on the state of media and how CBS can remain relevant in a challenging time for broadcast news. She also noted the barrage of interest and press in her arrival.

“I’m not going to stand up here today and ask you for your trust. I’m going to earn it, just like we have to do with our viewers,” Weiss told staff. “What I can give you is what I’ve always tried to give my readers a a journalist: transparency. Clarity. Straight talk. So here it is as plan as I can say it: I am here to make CBS News fit for purpose in the 21st century. Our industry has changed more in the last decade than 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.”

She also reiterated what her hand-picked CBS Evening News anchor Tony Dokoupil told viewers when he took over about how CBS can win back trust that all the mainstream media has lost.

“We have to start by looking honestly at ourselves. We are not producing a product that enough people want,” she said. “We can blame demographics or technology or fractured attention spans or ‘news avoidance,’ but these are all copes.

“The reality is twofold. First: Not enough people trust us. Not you. Us. As in: the mainstream media,” she added. “We can debate why that is, but the numbers tell the story. According to a recent Gallup poll, just 28 percent of people say we have their trust. Second: We are not doing enough to meet audiences where they are. So they are leaving us. 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.”

To that end, Weiss unveiled a slate of contributors, including podcasters and writers like Niall Ferguson, Andrew Huberman, Caroline Chambers and Casey Lewis. She also unveiled plans to bring on digital-first journalists who are veterans of social platforms like TikTok and YouTube.

She also showed a slide featuring Andrew Ross Sorkin, The New York Times and CNBC anchor, with “Sorkining” overlayed on his headshot. She told staff she wants to turn CBS News reporters into news brands themselves and attract creators to the news division so that it can help them become larger brands themselves.

And while there remains a lot of nostalgia for the legendary CBS Evening News anchor Walter Cronkite, she framed the current moment as about recognizing the current state of media, and while Cronkite had two competitors, CBS has “2 billion.” She said that while most of CBS News revenue is connected to ads on linear TV, ultimately everything they do will be streaming- and digital-first.

“Our strategy until now has been to cling to the audience that remains on broadcast television,” she said. “If we stick to that strategy, we’re toast.”

So what will it look like?

“We are going to put huge emphasis on scoops,” Weiss said. “Not scoops that expire minutes later. But investigative scoops. And, crucially, scoops of ideas. Scoops of explanation. This is where we can soar, and where we’ll be investing.”

The Free Press founder framed CBS News as “the best-capitalized media startup in the world,” now under the ownership of Skydance and David Ellison, but she also warned that change is coming.

“But startups aren’t for everyone. They’re places that move at a rapid speed. They experiment. They try new things. They sometimes create noise and, yes, bad press,” she said. “If that’s not your bag, that’s OK. It’s a free country and I completely respect if you decide this is just not the right place at the right time for you.”