Bari!
And the underserved audience.
Congratulations to Bari Weiss on the sale of The Free Press. She (and her sister and her wife) started it from scratch. Roughly three years later, they sold it for a great deal of money to Paramount Skydance. It takes brains and fierce determination to do something like that. The vast majority of people in the news business wouldn’t even try.
As part of the deal, Ms. Weiss was named editor-in-chief of CBS News and now has oversight of the editorial mix of news programming at The CBS Evening News, the CBS News weekday and weekend morning shows, ‘Face The Nation’, ‘60 Minutes’, CBS News streaming, CBS News.com, and a host of other “content” that the news division produces.
The challenges of her brief are considerable, given the current state of affairs. The audience is old (the average age of a CBS News viewer, according to the Nielsen ratings service, is 68 years old). An important part of the audience resides in “C and D” counties (ex-urban and rural) in the South and Midwest. That subset is older than the overall average age.
The total audience has been shrinking (and shrinking), year after year (after year). In 1980, The CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite had an audience of roughly 30 million. Forty-five years later, the average audience size for The CBS Evening News is less than 4 million. More than 90 percent of the audience has vanished in 45 years.
Among the top 50 US news websites by audience traffic, cbsnews.com ranks 41st, behind (among others) nj.com, which is a news website devoted almost entirely to news about New Jersey, and the dailydot.com, which is a website devoted to coverage of “the internet”.
Two things make matters worse. Advertisers spend most of their money in and on the “demo”, which is adults aged 18-49. Equally important, advertising agencies have mostly abandoned showcasing their A-list clients’ products on, or adjacent to, news programming. The “news environment”, ad agencies believe, is too toxic; too fraught with “downside political risk.”
