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Billboard Women in Music 2025
The venerable “CBS Evening News” has, for many of its viewers, been something consumed along with dinner. In recent weeks, the show has served up reports that could stop someone in mid-bite.
Correspondent Nikki Battiste recently traveled to New Jersey, where CBS News cameras were allowed into the bedroom of an ALS patient on the day she had chosen to die. The video stopped just before the woman drank medicine that would put her into a deep sleep before passing on — all legal under state law. Half a world away, foreign correspondent Debora Patta recently managed to get into Sudan after two years of trying, and delivered a searing report on the plight of children there who aren’t getting the help once expected from the now-shuttered United States Agency for International Development. One infant shown in the report was starving, barely able to move, and clearly blind in one eye.
Both stories were given more than four minutes of airtime — an eternity in a program that lasts just half an hour, with a good chunk of that devoted to commercials. “It’s not a story you can tell in 90 seconds,” says Patta, during a recent phone call from Cape Town. “It’s just not.”
CBS has picked a fraught time to see if it can successfully shake up TV’s hoary evening news format, which still aims to update viewers getting home from work with the biggest stories of the day — even if those items have been chewed up and spit out on cable and social media. “CBS Evening News” has run in third place behind ABC and NBC for years, but it remains one of the best-known offerings from the Paramount Global network, with a storied history that reaches back to Dan Rather and Walter Cronkite. CBS News’ big swing comes amid industry drama: The TV-news business faces a slew of challenges to reach digital viewers, and Paramount is awaiting regulatory approval to be acquired by Skydance Media, with the company cutting millions of dollars in costs in the interim. Last week, CBS announced it would leave its 12:30 a.m. hour empty of original programming after late-night host Taylor Tomlinson opted to devote herself fully to stand-up comedy.
It’s also a tough era for figuring out what news audiences want to see. There is still a sizable audience that wants the usual evening debrief, with quick-hit reports on the news of the day, and a few inspirational segments featuring good deeds and interesting ideas from all over America, all delivered between commercials for pharmaceuticals with names like Librela and Rinvoq. Nearly 17.3 million people watched “CBS Evening News,” “NBC Nightly News” and ABC’s “World News Tonight” last week, according to Nielsen . And yet, more people can keep up with minute-by-minute changes in news stories all day by staying close to the web and social media. In a future driven by artificial intelligence, a journalism fan might be able to get a summary of breaking news across multiple subjects with a well-crafted query — negating any need for a summary show in the early evening.
The nation needs good journalism. How best to make viewers want to watch? That may be a mystery without an immediate solution. “Every audience, every generation, is on a different platform consuming news, and we have to meet our audiences now in so many different places,” says Kate West, an assistant professor of journalism at the Moody School of Communication at the University of Texas at Austin. “You can’t expect them tune into the evening newscast.”
Perhaps that’s why CBS has launched a version of “Evening News” that is not like anything else on mainstream broadcast TV.
This “Evening News” has two anchors — John Dickerson and Maurice DuBois — not the single voice that many viewers have come to expect from the format. This “Evening News” likely won’t lead off each night with a rat-a-tat-tat series of headlines and on many days has little room from the daily utterances of President Donald Trump. And this “Evening News” gives more of a spotlight to the reporters around the globe who help put it together — even letting them surface before commercial breaks to tell viewers to stay tuned for their coming stories.
Many reports like those from Patta and Battiste have CBS News reporters holding forth from Iowa, Kanas, Missouri or spots from around the globe, rather than well-worn perches in front of the White House or the U.S. Capitol. The idea is to get people thinking of “CBS Evening News” in much the same way they do another CBS mainstay, “60 Minutes.” Indeed, Bill Owens, the executive producer of the newsmagazine, is now also overseeing “Evening News.”
“On Mondays, people are talking about something that happened on ‘60 Minutes,’ and every night we’re trying to deliver that a few times in these stories,” he says. Such efforts give rise to original content that isn’t available elsewhere and hasn’t already been hammered by cable pundits and the digirati. Such stuff might also have new life via TikTok or YouTube, and have appeal to a new group of people who have been turned off by incessant and dour reports of increasingly harsh weather, backsliding democracy and overseas war.
For now, at least, people aren’t racing to watch. Since its debut following President Trump’s second inauguration, the audience for the retooled “CBS Evening News” has fallen significantly, shedding nearly 800,000 viewers overall and more than 200,000 between 25 and 54 — the demographic coveted most by advertisers in news programming. Still, these are early days, and CBS research shows new interest in “Evening News” in places like Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Baltimore, Pittsburgh and Phoenix, with a recent surge in viewers who say the program offers them context and perspective. Views on the “CBS Evening News:” YouTube channel have increased 25% in March over the same period last year.
CBS has muddied the waters somewhat by dropping several Friday broadcasts of “Evening News” from Nielsen tabulation with a practice known as “retitling,” according to two people familiar with the matter. The network gives a lower-rated broadcast a different name, so it’s not counted in Nielsen’s analysis of the show’s other, properly titled episodes. CBS isn’t alone in its use of the technique — many of the network news divisions tap it with increasing frequency — but such a move doesn’t suggest complete confidence in recent performance.
Executives say they are cautiously optimistic about the new “Evening News” trajectory. Every programming switch brings with it a dose of viewer “churn,” they say, and the fall off in recent weeks is not as severe as declines that took place when “Evening News” made previous anchor changes. They may be studying other lessons from the past. When CBS overhauled its morning program, and hired Charlie Rose, Gayle King and Erica Hill to lead a new “CBS This Morning,” the network had to navigate its way through months of ratings uncertainty, according to people familiar with the show’s trajectory. In 2025, “CBS Mornings” remains in third, but it has made gains in certain critical audiences — and has crept closer to “Good Morning America” in the critical audience that is between 25 and 54.
What buoys most of the people involved in “Evening News” is the fact that they are producing a show that has more of the things viewers and journalism aficionados say they want, and less of what they don’t. Staffers privately say they like the additional time their stories get on camera, and they get on screen. There is a heighted emphasis on in-depth reporting, more correspondents on the ground in places other than New York, Washington D.C. and Los Angeles, and more attention paid to the effects of White House policies on blue-collar workers. There are no “breaking news” chyrons in the lower third of the screen, and fewer pivots to tell viewers about stuff that’s popping off the new wires while the show is already in progress. “We might do some breaking news, but it has to rise to a certain level,” says DuBois.
It’s a massive test of what will ultimately bring viewers to a screen in an era when streaming video is on the rise and every bedrock element of the TV business is crumbling. Audiences have in recent years gravitated to news shows that feature interruptions, conflicts, clashes, and lots of on-screen bells and whistles. The most-watched program in cable news is “The Five,” a roundtable show that often has liberal panelist Jessica Tarlov trying to score debate points with four conservative colleagues. At CNN, the program that has gained new traction is “News Night” a late-evening panel program that relies on demure anchor Abby Phillip to keep peace among contributors from across the political spectrum.
CBS, meanwhile, has tried to cut a different path. Some of the most-watched programs in broadcast news are the network’s Sunday offerings, which include “Sunday Morning” and “60 Minutes.” The network has already tried to imbue its weekday program with some of the markings of its Sunday A.M. mainstay. Now it’s time to give “Evening News” a Sunday injection.
“It’s the big bet,” acknowledges Dickerson of the new format.
Such moves are necessary, says Wendy McMahon, the CBS executive who oversees the company’s news, stations and syndication businesses. “We were third,” she says. “To continue to do a product every night that is consistent with what our competitors are doing is a commitment to staying in third.”
Under McMahon, CBS has reworked its news division in a series of rip-the-Band-Aid-off maneuvers. Barriers between CBS News and the company’s local stations have fallen. Two new CBS News companion shows for “CBS Mornings” and “CBS Evening News” are built to stream and to appear on local stations that want to include them. Some top CBS News personnel, including Norah O’Donnell and Jeff Glor, have been given new assignments or parted ways with the company.
In weeks to come, the new “Evening News” may look even more distinctive. Lester Holt, the steady presence behind the desk on NBC in the evenings, will step down this summer, when he will be succeeded by Tom Llamas, a younger anchor who was once seen as poised to eventually succeed David Muir, the evening anchor at ABC. The bet within CBS is that the NBC newscast will look more like ABC’s, leaving “Evening News” with something different to offer. “There’s always going to be churn when you make a change,” says McMahon. “And I feel like our show will be completely operating on all cylinders” when NBC makes its anchor switch.
Siphoning viewers away from rivals isn’t really the main plan. “I always cite the research of the 50-50 conundrum, which is that 50% of people want an evening news product that is a recap of the day and 50% of people say, ‘I don’t need to watch the evening news because it’s just a recap of the day of the headlines that I’ve seen all day,’” says McMahon. “And so I think David Muir’s show completely nails that first 50, right? I think our opportunity is in the audience that says, ‘Give me a reason to watch the evening news again. Will I learn something? Will I find out something new? Will this be an exploration of versus a repetitiveness of all that I saw today?’ And so that’s the guiding light in many respects. That’s the audience piece that we’re betting on.”
Much of the task of standing up a new “Evening News” falls to Guy Campanile, a CBS News veteran who has logged many years working for Scott Pelley, Katie Couric and “60 Minutes.” On one afternoon, with just a few hours before a new “Evening News” broadcast starts, he was waiting for reports from correspondents flung around the country. Some of them were coming in very close to deadline.
“We have a correspondent reporting out of Arkansas today with a woman who believes her husband was among those who was rounded up and sent to El Salvador, and our reporting indicates that he is not running with anybody, and there’s no indication he’s a gang member. He has no criminal record,” Campanile says while checking on the status of the night’s stories. “He went to the ICE office, as is required for an asylum seeker to check in, and they kept them there, and now we think he’s in that prison.” The story makes it to air, with interviews and a cinematic look, even as wire headlines flash that President Trump is expected to issue an executive order calling for the end of the Department of Education.
This “Evening News” is less reliant on its anchors. Gone is a large space in its headquarters once reserved for the main face of “Evening News” (Scott Pelley had room for a rack of weights and a giant maritime painting). Now there’s more emphasis on the correspondents. Even CBS’ White House crew is finding ways to get out of spitting distance of the West Wing. Nancy Cordes recently traveled to Baltimore to give viewers a sense of what a family that has a child with Down Syndrome might grapple with if the Trump administration succeeds in cutting certain government policies. Ed O’Keefe, meanwhile, flew to Ontario to examine the effect of Trump tariffs on electricity from Canada.
DuBois and Dickerson weren’t necessarily groomed for this job, a change from how evening anchors were selected in the past. Dickerson, a former writer for Time and Slate, has been a familiar CBS News face over the years, holding forth at “Face The Nation” and “CBS This Morning.” He also hosts a half-hour “CBS Evening News Plus” that streams immediately after “CBS Evening News” ends for the night. DuBois spent much of his career at WNBC and WCBS in New York, and maintains a smooth, unflappable presence that contrasts with Dickerson’s kinetic, lean-forward style. “I know the difference between 9/11 and another story,” says DuBois. “There’s a time for your hair to be on fire, and there’s a time to understand that this is a story to simply tell the viewers.”
In days to come, reporters are likely to get more spotlight. “We are going to redo the newsroom so we can feature our family of journalists as part of the broadcast,” says Campanile, who envisions a track camera being deployed to “sweep in and sweep out and show our viewers that we are working.”
Dickerson and DuBois are eager to do stories of their own, but chances are viewers won’t see them hightailing it to the scene of a school shooting or massive tornado damage. That is in many cases left to reporters on the ground, who know the areas where such disasters have taken place.
In an era when attention is hard to win, Dickerson thinks the new format will reward those who turn to it. This newscast, he says, is less dependent on the beat of official Washington for its nightly lineup. And it gives people room to think. “There are not 18 different stories crammed into the first five minutes,” he says. “You know others will open up with five headlines, and they repeat the headlines again, and there’s not much more than the headline itself.”
Another news program that aims for longer stories and enterprise journalism regularly wins critical acclaim but has significantly fewer viewers than its broadcast counterparts. The “PBS News Hour” wins about 1.9 million viewers to its nightly newscast and, behind the scenes, executives have begun focusing more intently on reaching its audience via digital media.
There is a risk that the changes spur “Evening News” regulars to sample something else, says Mark Feldstein, chair of the broadcast journalism program at university of Maryland. “The real question will be if this doesn’t work, what comes next?” he asks. If viewership falls to an unacceptable level in an era when cost-cutting is top of mind, might executives think “it’s not the original Coke anyway, and there will be less people who will miss it?”
Executives think if they keep putting out smart stories every day, word will get out. When asked if viewers were ready for a new format that seeks more of their attention, Campanile replies that “viewers aren’t ready unless you show them what you’re going to do. Then you’ve got to give them a chance to make that decision. That chance — that takes time,” he says, noting that even “60 Minutes” had to fight for attention in its earliest days. “That’s not something that happens in a week, two weeks or two months. You have to make the investment.”
All CBS News can do is keep setting the table. It’s the audience that will decide whether it’s time to eat.
