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TYNDALL HEADLINE: HIGHLIGHTS FROM APRIL 7, 2011
Welcome to any readers of Brian Stelter at The New York Times arriving here to check out my opinion on whether a potential move from 60 Minutes to CBS Evening News would be a demotion for Scott Pelley. This is a thinkpiece I wrote last year about the prospects for a half-hour evening newscast maintaining its viability in an online digital age in which the 24-hour news cycle is an anachronism.
TYNDALL PICKS FOR APRIL 7, 2011: CLICK ON GRID ELEMENTS TO SEARCH FOR MATCHING ITEMS
WOULD SCOTT PELLEY BE ACCEPTING A DEMOTION? Welcome to any readers of Brian Stelter at The New York Times arriving here to check out my opinion on whether a potential move from 60 Minutes to CBS Evening News would be a demotion for Scott Pelley. This is a thinkpiece I wrote last year about the prospects for a half-hour evening newscast maintaining its viability in an online digital age in which the 24-hour news cycle is an anachronism.
60 Minutes has already taken strides to establish a brand for itself standing separately from CBS News. It airs business-related reruns from its archive on CNBC, a nominal competitor. It seeks to go beyond its broadcast timeslot with its Overtime extras.
The next anchor at CBS Evening News, whether Pelley or anyone else, would have a similar task. The measure of the new anchor's success will be the ability to make such a transformation--not the newscast's Nielsen ratings in the 6:30 timeslot. Pulling off such a success would be no demotion.
CREATIVE ANGLES FROM CAPITOL HILL BY CORDES AND KARL Partisan maneuvering on Capitol Hill over the federal budget was the Story of the Day for the third straight day. For the third straight day CBS, which had Harry Smith as its substitute host, led with the negotiations over what spending would be cut in the package that funds government operations for the remainder of the fiscal year. NBC had a substitute host too, Ann Curry from Today; it decided to lead with a Richter 7.1 aftershock off the coast of Japan that, fortunately, failed to produce a tsunami. ABC, whose anchor Diane Sawyer was on a field trip to Chicago, yet again chose a quixotic lead story: this time Sharyn Alfonsi covered a small study published in Health Affairs; it found that hospitals make many more errors in patient care than they report, perhaps ten times as many.
In their quest for imaginative reporting on the looming government shutdown of inessential services, the Capitol Hill correspondents at both ABC and CBS went the extra mile. CBS' Nancy Cordes used a wheel of affiliate correspondents, spinning from a clinic in Philadelphia to the polluted waters of the Chesapeake Bay to a Minneapolis hospital. ABC's Jonathan Karl turned to his network's archive and the soundbite editing machine to show history repeating itself. NBC used a less creative Kelly O'Donnell.
All three White House correspondents got in on the budget act: ABC's Jake Tapper with a full report; NBC's Chuck Todd and CBS' Chip Reid with stand-up q-&-a's. Face the Nation anchor Bob Schieffer rounded out the coverage on CBS with a rebuke for the fingerpointing Solons: "a shameful episode."
ALFONSI’S HYPERBOLE SETS UP ANCHOR VISIT A couple of weeks ago ABC's Sharyn Alfonsi concluded a feature on the role of women in the workforce with an exaggeration that was so flagrant that it qualified as a flatout lie. Referring to McDonald's, Alfonsi concluded that "64% of store managers are women and most of them started flipping burgers"--here comes the whopper, so to speak--"meaning that girl who asks you if you want to supersize today has a real shot of becoming the company's CEO tomorrow."
At the time, I wondered why Alfonsi would so clumsily conflate being a store manage with being a CEO…and why she would so misleadingly invert the odds that the CEO had a burger-flipping origin with the odds that a burger-flipper had a CEO in her destiny.
Wait and all will be revealed. Check out the central feature in the ABC anchor's reporting from Chicago: a profile of Jan Fields, president of the McDonald's Corporation, and one-time French-frier. Fields used the opportunity of her Diane Sawyer Reporting profile to announce plans to hire 50,000 new burger flippers next week: "We are redefining the term McJobs," she boasted, although not, apparently, its starting wage, still $17,000 annually. Fields, noted Sawyer, will urge her new hires "to smile their way to the top of the food chain."
Fast food is in ABC's sweet spot: check out the last ten evening newscast packages filed on the industry: seven of the ten were from ABC
THURSDAY’S THOUGHTS Hurricane Katrina damage $81bn; Sendai earthquake-&-tsunami $300bn: Celia Hatton's statistics on CBS
ABC filed no overseas stories; NBC covered Japan and Libya and Mexico: Mark Potter's Investigation on Tex-Mex border corruption
Today's Meredith Vieira failed to nail Celebrity Apprentice's Donald Trump for his newfound trutherism and birtherism…her DC-based colleague Lisa Myers bails her out
Claire Shipman claimed an Exclusive for her ABC sitdown with the Widow Kennedy--but what did Victoria say that a rival would want?
Sports fans can be rowdy hooligans, CBS' Bill Whitaker discovers. Never heard of the Beautiful Game?
How does one freeze-dry a strawberry? ABC's Deborah Roberts does not tell--but it might be good for your esophagus
60 Minutes has already taken strides to establish a brand for itself standing separately from CBS News. It airs business-related reruns from its archive on CNBC, a nominal competitor. It seeks to go beyond its broadcast timeslot with its Overtime extras.
The next anchor at CBS Evening News, whether Pelley or anyone else, would have a similar task. The measure of the new anchor's success will be the ability to make such a transformation--not the newscast's Nielsen ratings in the 6:30 timeslot. Pulling off such a success would be no demotion.
CREATIVE ANGLES FROM CAPITOL HILL BY CORDES AND KARL Partisan maneuvering on Capitol Hill over the federal budget was the Story of the Day for the third straight day. For the third straight day CBS, which had Harry Smith as its substitute host, led with the negotiations over what spending would be cut in the package that funds government operations for the remainder of the fiscal year. NBC had a substitute host too, Ann Curry from Today; it decided to lead with a Richter 7.1 aftershock off the coast of Japan that, fortunately, failed to produce a tsunami. ABC, whose anchor Diane Sawyer was on a field trip to Chicago, yet again chose a quixotic lead story: this time Sharyn Alfonsi covered a small study published in Health Affairs; it found that hospitals make many more errors in patient care than they report, perhaps ten times as many.
In their quest for imaginative reporting on the looming government shutdown of inessential services, the Capitol Hill correspondents at both ABC and CBS went the extra mile. CBS' Nancy Cordes used a wheel of affiliate correspondents, spinning from a clinic in Philadelphia to the polluted waters of the Chesapeake Bay to a Minneapolis hospital. ABC's Jonathan Karl turned to his network's archive and the soundbite editing machine to show history repeating itself. NBC used a less creative Kelly O'Donnell.
All three White House correspondents got in on the budget act: ABC's Jake Tapper with a full report; NBC's Chuck Todd and CBS' Chip Reid with stand-up q-&-a's. Face the Nation anchor Bob Schieffer rounded out the coverage on CBS with a rebuke for the fingerpointing Solons: "a shameful episode."
ALFONSI’S HYPERBOLE SETS UP ANCHOR VISIT A couple of weeks ago ABC's Sharyn Alfonsi concluded a feature on the role of women in the workforce with an exaggeration that was so flagrant that it qualified as a flatout lie. Referring to McDonald's, Alfonsi concluded that "64% of store managers are women and most of them started flipping burgers"--here comes the whopper, so to speak--"meaning that girl who asks you if you want to supersize today has a real shot of becoming the company's CEO tomorrow."
At the time, I wondered why Alfonsi would so clumsily conflate being a store manage with being a CEO…and why she would so misleadingly invert the odds that the CEO had a burger-flipping origin with the odds that a burger-flipper had a CEO in her destiny.
Wait and all will be revealed. Check out the central feature in the ABC anchor's reporting from Chicago: a profile of Jan Fields, president of the McDonald's Corporation, and one-time French-frier. Fields used the opportunity of her Diane Sawyer Reporting profile to announce plans to hire 50,000 new burger flippers next week: "We are redefining the term McJobs," she boasted, although not, apparently, its starting wage, still $17,000 annually. Fields, noted Sawyer, will urge her new hires "to smile their way to the top of the food chain."
Fast food is in ABC's sweet spot: check out the last ten evening newscast packages filed on the industry: seven of the ten were from ABC
THURSDAY’S THOUGHTS Hurricane Katrina damage $81bn; Sendai earthquake-&-tsunami $300bn: Celia Hatton's statistics on CBS
ABC filed no overseas stories; NBC covered Japan and Libya and Mexico: Mark Potter's Investigation on Tex-Mex border corruption
Today's Meredith Vieira failed to nail Celebrity Apprentice's Donald Trump for his newfound trutherism and birtherism…her DC-based colleague Lisa Myers bails her out
Claire Shipman claimed an Exclusive for her ABC sitdown with the Widow Kennedy--but what did Victoria say that a rival would want?
Sports fans can be rowdy hooligans, CBS' Bill Whitaker discovers. Never heard of the Beautiful Game?
How does one freeze-dry a strawberry? ABC's Deborah Roberts does not tell--but it might be good for your esophagus
