Norah O'Donnell slid into the CBS Evening News anchor chair on July 15, shifting from her spot at CBS This Morning. She's had some significant gets since moving to evenings, including interviews with Apple CEO Tim Cook and Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos.
CBS Evening News anchor Norah ODonnell
O'Donnell is ready for another shift, as CBS News prepares to relocate its evening newscast to Washington. The D.C.-based newscast debuts the first week of December. A set is being built in the division's D.C. bureau. O'Donnell is well-connected in our nation's capital, where she covered the White House, Congress and the Pentagon before becoming an anchor.
CBS Evening News has been mired in third place among the broadcast networks for years, but ratings are ticking up. For the week ending Nov. 15, the program averaged just over 6 million total viewers, and 1.2 million viewers 25-54, which CBS said is its best performance since March. It has far to go, but CBS News president and senior executive producer Susan Zirinsky likes her Evening News talent. I really think we have the right person in the right job at the right time, Zirinsky said.
O'Donnell succeeded Jeff Glor on the evening desk. Alternating between anchoring from Washington and from New York before the official move, she spoke with B C about the Beltway relocation, her run so far on Evening News and what's next for the broadcast. An edited transcript follows.
B C: Why the move to D.C.?
Norah O'Donnell: I've been a beat reporter my whole life. Before I was anchoring the morning news, I covered the Pentagon, I covered Congress, I covered the White House. As an anchor, I've covered hurricanes and school shootings. The best way to cover stories is to get as close to them as you can. We looked at the landscape in 2020 and said, How can we best cover what's going to be the biggest story of the day? And so the executives made the decision about moving the broadcast to Washington.
When Susan Zirinsky came to me and said, Hey, we'd like you to anchor the Evening News, and we're thinking about moving it to Washington, I thought, wow, that's really interesting. I can already tell the whole team is energized by it. I think our reporting is always what sets CBS apart, and we're continuing to build on that. And I think we're better positioned than ever to do that now.
B C: Any concern that some viewers are sick of Washington, that there's D.C. fatigue out there?
NO: I don't think so. There's a way to tell a story. Look at farming: We had a record number of farmers committing suicide, you have farmers going bankrupt and where does a lot of that policy decision-making, in terms of helping them out financially, originate from? Washington. So we cover the story by visiting some of the farms that are failing, but we come back and do some reporting about what's happening in Washington that's leading to this from an economic policy, a trade policy, a lack of subsidy policy, whatever it is. That just augments the story that we're telling out in the field.
This is not a Washington broadcast. It originates in Washington and is going to use the resources here to deliver the smartest and newsiest broadcast.
B C: How do you grade yourself on the evening newscast so far?
NO: I'm really, really proud of this broadcast. It's a 30-minute broadcast, so it has to be tight. We can't tell every story every night. It's a venerable newscast and a legacy broadcast. And so, it's a high bar every night about what we put on the air. I'm really proud of everything we've done. I also feel like we're just getting started. It's a new team and it's a really strong team and we're just beginning to evolve.
B C: How is the newscast different from what it was six months ago?
NO: I don't ever compare myself to anybody else or compare the broadcast.
It's not unlike what we were doing in the morning; we always said, more real news. We always said, the news is back in the morning, and that's how I approach the evening news. We want to be the smartest, most trusted broadcast out there. There's a survey out today that says Americans feel like they're bombarded by a lot of information. They don't know which ones to trust. I want our audience to know that they can trust CBS News.
The broadcast networks all think that. We've got probably the newsiest broadcast. We had [correspondent] Charlie D'Agata out of Syria most of last week [Nov. 11-15], almost every night. That's different than our colleagues. Our London bureau is absolutely superb; the correspondents are top notch. I hope we're doing more international and foreign news than our colleagues. Syria is at the top of the list because that involves our American forces, and people do care about our military. They care about where our forces are stationed, they care about where we're spending money overseas in terms of where we put our military resources.
B C: How else is CBS Evening News different from the competition?
NO: NBC and ABC do a great job. I have a lot of friends over there. But the correspondents that we have are superb reporters. We've got honestly the best editors and cameramen. 60 Minutes would be a great example, where you see it in a longer format, but I see it on our air every night, too. The way we shoot and tell a story from a production standpoint is just exemplary. What I wanted to do in coming over as the anchor and managing editor is, how do we showcase better? We're trying to better showcase the correspondents that we have and all the journalists that work with a correspondent, from the production team to the photographers.
B C: What's next for the newscast besides the new address?
NO: We're playing the
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Norah O'Donnell slid into the CBS Evening News anchor chair on July 15, shifting from her spot at CBS This Morning. She's had some significant gets since moving to evenings, including interviews with Apple CEO Tim Cook and Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos.
