The 'Evening News' is going to have a long run, both as a broadcast and as a presence online and on cellphones. It is a franchise with a very rich tradition.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I'm so impressed with the quality of the 'Evening News.'
At the end of the day, my focus will be to make the 'Evening News' as strong from an editorial perspective as it possibly can be.
We now assume that when people turn on the evening news, they basically already know what the news is. They've heard it on the radio. They've seen it on the Internet. They've seen it on one of the cable companies. So that makes our job a bit different.
Watching the evening news in 2011 is a strange time-travel experience. 'The CBS Evening News,' 'ABC World News' and 'NBC Nightly News' haven't changed their style over the decades, still going for that old-fashioned mix of voice-of-authority pomp and feel-good fluff. The difference is that people aren't watching.
What is news? It's hard to quantify. Certainly news has changed completely, and the morning shows are not really designed to bring you the news, except to tell you what happened overnight, and the rest of it is a kind of magazine mentality - a little bit of this, a little bit of that. It's harder to be an educated and informed citizen.
With 24-hour news... the story moves on with the media.
People magazine had been around for a short period of time, but nobody had thought about putting entertainment news on a nightly basis on television.
Television news is now entertainment, and the stories are being written by the people that have a special interest in them.
Through their 'Making a Difference' franchise, I am excited to work with NBC News to continue to highlight stories of organizations and individuals who make their communities and our world healthier, more just and more humane.
The evening news is a concept whose time has come and gone.