CBS News Prime Time With John Dickerson launches on CBS News Streaming Network Tuesday, September 6. The program will stream live Monday through Thursday at 7 p.m. ET/PT. 

Dickerson is CBS News chief political analyst and senior national correspondent. “He’ll provide insights and historical perspective to the day's events so that viewers have a deeper understanding of not just what is going on but why it is and why it matters,” according to CBS News. 

CBS News Streaming Network launched as CBSN in late 2014. 

“I couldn’t be more excited about John Dickerson joining the streaming program lineup,”  Neeraj Khemlani, president and co-head of CBS News and Stations, said. “John looks at the world the way a historian does. He’s fantastic with bringing context, and explaining the why behind the news. 

“When you think of primetime in general, there is so much opinion out there, and we’re fortunate to have a steward like John Dickerson anchoring a nightly show on our streaming channel to make sense of the day,” Khemlani said.

The program is based at the CBS Broadcast Center in New York. 

“What CBS News has developed with streaming is a platform for the basic reason any of us get into journalism — the gift of getting to take the trust our viewers and readers give us and using that obligation to explore the world, figure out what is happening, why it’s happening and report back in proportion and the right order,” Dickerson said. “I also love their experimental instincts on the streaming team which I’ve tried to work on during my career — leaving print to go into digital journalism in its early stage; starting a podcast 16 years ago when few knew what a podcast was. My hope for this show is that it will evolve like the medium and the news stories that we cover every day.”

The CBS News Streaming Network delivers live national streams, 13 local streams and content from programs like 60 Minutes and CBS Sunday Morning. 

“John’s show will invite the audience to join him for an intimate conversation as he connects the dots on the biggest stories of the day,” Anthony Galloway, CBS News Streaming senior VP, said. “Viewers can come in and take a seat and learn more about why these important stories matter.” ■

CBS News and Stations has rebranded streaming service CBSN and has “reimagined” the direct-to-consumer platform as well, the group said. Now called CBS News Streaming Network, it launches from a new studio in New York, and offers new programming. 

The rebrand represents the latest move from CBS News and Stations to bolster the partnership between the network news division and the owned station group. 

CBS News and Stations also launched the CBS News Miami streaming channel January 24, representing WFOR Miami, the 13th station in the group to debut what had been known as CBSN Local. The station streaming sites are now named CBS News and the name of the market. 

CBS News Streaming Network delivers live national streams, the 13 local streams and content from programs such as 60 Minutes, CBS Evening News and Face the Nation, and new programs too. 

Neeraj Khemlani and Wendy McMahon were named presidents and co-heads of CBS News and Stations in April.   

“We’re unlocking the power of CBS News — streaming the best of our reporting and storytelling on television to viewers everywhere,” Khemlani said. “From up-to-the-minute reporting from our new live news desk, signature interviews by Gayle King and Norah O’Donnell, adventures on CBS Sunday Morning and 60 Minutes, true crime on 48 Hours–and reporting out of Washington to Ukraine to Beijing — we’re delivering a 24/7 experience with quality journalism from the best news brands in the business.”

The national and local streaming channels representing CBS News and Stations delivered more than 1 billion streams in 2021. CBS Stations local streams increased 37% from 2020, CBS said.  

“CBS News and Stations’ local streaming channels are growing at a rapid pace and will continue this year through the significant expansion of coverage in all of our markets, giving us an additional 15,000 hours of live local news per year by the end of 2022,” McMahon said. “Our commitment reflects the relevance and importance of local news to audiences across the country. We are excited to launch CBS News Miami today and look forward to completing the rollout of our local streaming channels later this year when we debut CBS News Detroit. Unifying our brands and newsgathering resources positions us to deliver the best local-to-national-to global streaming news experience to our consumers however they want to watch.”

McMahon told B+C the CBSN rebrand was on the minds of her and Khemlani since both took over in April. “We recognized that we have these resources to be able to create a new product and a new experience, and this has been on our road maps since day one,” she said. 

The game plan involved delivering a “premium experience” to users, she said, and “to position ourselves for the business of tomorrow.”

Streaming anchors include Vladimir Duthiers, Anne-Marie Green, Tanya Rivero, Lana Zak and  Elaine Quijano. They will be joined by Tony Dokoupil of CBS Mornings, Michelle Miller, Jeff Glor and Dana Jacobson of CBS Saturday Morning and Jericka Duncan of CBS Weekend News, among other talent. 

Daytime programming on the streaming network includes new shows Here Comes the Sun with Tracy Smith and Lee Cowan, Dokoupil-hosted The Uplift, featuring motivational stories, and the Norah O’Donnell interview show Person-to-Person. Gayle King hosts CBS Reports, featuring documentaries and special reports, starting February 25. 

The evening lineup starts at 6 p.m. with nightly politics program Red and Blue. A news hour happens at 7 p.m. and 8 to 10 p.m. offers content from CBS News programs such as 60 Minutes, and the new programs. 

CBS News Detroit launches later this year. WWJ Detroit plans to launch local newscasts in late summer or early fall. ■

WWJ Detroit, the ViacomCBS-owned station, plans to build a full-scale local news department that serves both a 24/7 streaming service and early morning, midday, early evening and late news on linear. CBS News Detroit is expected to launch in late summer or early fall 2022. 

WWJ is a rare Big Four-aligned station that does not produce local news. 

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“We view this as an unprecedented opportunity to start from scratch at a large-market, network-owned station and build the newsroom of the future–where we focus first on streaming and then have our content flow like water across our linear broadcast, digital and social media platforms,” said Wendy McMahon, president and co-head, CBS News and Stations. “When Brian [Watson, WWJ VP and general manager] and his team presented their vision for CBS News Detroit earlier this year, I thought to myself ‘This never happens. Until now.’”

Known as CBS 62, WWJ became part of the CBS group in 1995. WWJ aired an 11 p.m. news in 2001 and 2002, produced by WKBD. WKBD’s news department was shuttered at the end of 2002. From 2009 to 2012, WWJ produced a 5-7 a.m. news that featured weather, traffic and headlines from the Detroit Free Press and WWJ Radio. More recently, the station has aired two-minute “Eye on Detroit” reports during CBS This Morning and online, and “First Forecast” weather updates throughout the day.

CBS News Detroit will feature a round-the-clock streaming service with live local news coverage from 4 a.m. to 11:35 p.m. The station will also broadcast 40 hours a week of local newscasts. 

Watson told B+C he’s wanted to launch a news department “since I arrived on Day One,” in summer 2012. He pitched it to CBS Stations leadership, including Adrienne Roark, president, and got the green light. 

Roark was named president of CBS Stations in July, with oversight of the group primarily in the eastern half of the U.S. “I thought, wow--this is an unprecedented opportunity to literally start from scratch--a news organization in a large market,” Roark told B+C.

CBSN New York was the first local OTT platform in the CBS group to launch, late in 2018. Twelve out of 13 news-producing stations in the CBS group have launched the ad-supported OTT platform, with CBSN Miami scheduled to premiere in mid January. 

Also: CBS News and Stations Launches CBSN Baltimore

WWJ will hire a full news staff, including a news director. The station will be more focused on hiring multimedia journalists than big-name anchors. Reporters will be embedded full-time in communities across the Detroit market, and in state capital Lansing. Watson mentioned “an atmosphere of hustle” in the newsroom. 

Roark described the WWJ approach to news as “streaming first, then linear.” She would not share the number of personnel to be hired, but said it will be comparable to the competition’s headcount. 

“We are fully invested in this project,” she said.  

Detroit is full of strong local news outfits. Fox owns WJBK in DMA No. 15, Scripps has ABC affiliate WXYZ and MyNetworkTV-aligned WMYD and Graham Media Group has NBC affiliate WDIV. 

“The time has come for our Detroit employees and the communities served by CBS 62 to have a full-fledged news department that utilizes the latest advances in newsgathering and streaming technology and a team of multi-skilled journalists who will be embedded in neighborhoods across the market,” said Roark. 

Watson said the newsroom will reflect the way people consume news today. “This is a landmark moment in the history of our station and, for that matter, local news,” he said. “I don’t believe there is another station in a large market like ours that has done anything like this, so we are excited to help write a bold new chapter in the history of local news. My colleagues and I are deeply grateful to Wendy McMahon, Adrienne Roark and everyone else on the CBS News and Stations and ViacomCBS leadership teams for their incredible support and belief in our mission.”

He added: “CBS News Detroit will stand out as the market’s only grassroots, community-focused news gathering organization. We will super-serve our audiences on every media platform with more hours of live, local news than any other source in Detroit. Our journalists will be committed to giving a voice to people who might otherwise be unheard, and shining a light on the issues that are impacting communities throughout Metro Detroit.” ■

CBS News and Stations presents the special Surfside Collapse: A Search For Answers July 1 at 7:30 p.m. on CBS-owned WFOR Miami, then streaming on CBSN nationwide at 8 p.m. CBS News national correspondent Manuel Bojorquez reports for CBSN and WFOR anchor Lauren Pastrana reports for the station. 

In the spring, CBS combined CBS News and its owned stations, saying the merger “will maximize the power of CBS’ newsgathering and production operations to serve audiences across all national, digital, local and global platforms.”

Surfside Collapse: A Search for Answers is “a culmination of all the on-the-ground reporting from CBS News and Stations surrounding the tragedy,” said CBS. “The special will provide a first-person perspective on what happened, a look into the individual stories of the families impacted, the latest up-to-the-minute developments on the recovery efforts from the ground and an examination of what is currently known about the cause of the deadly building collapse.”

WFOR, known as CBS4, went on the air at 4 a.m. ET June 24 to report on the collapse of the apartment building. CBS Evening News anchor Norah O’Donnell anchored from the scene that same day. 

Surfside Collapse is co-produced by CBSN senior vice president and senior executive producer Darius Walker and Alvin Patrick, executive producer of the CBS News Race & Culture Unit, in partnership with WFOR.

CBS News and Stations has launched CBSN Sacramento, an ad-supported, direct-to-consumer streaming news service. The stations behind CBSN Sacramento are KOVR and KMAX Sacramento, a CBS-CW pair. 

The launch is the 11th for CBS News and Stations, following the deployment of CBSN New York in late 2018, and similar launches in Los Angeles, Boston, the San Francisco Bay Area, the Twin Cities of Minnesota, Philadelphia, Denver, Pittsburgh, Chicago and Dallas-Fort Worth. 

“Today’s launch of CBSN Sacramento represents the beginning of an exciting new chapter in the history of our stations,” said Justin Draper, VP/general manager of KOVR and KMAX. “We are thrilled to have this opportunity to build on our position in the Sacramento market as the producer of the most hours of local news by dramatically expanding distribution with the launch of our local news streaming service. We recognize there is an audience for news from California’s state capital that extends far beyond the reach of our broadcast signal. We look forward to providing our premium local news content to this wider audience whenever and however they want to watch.”

Similar launches await in Baltimore and Miami for CBS News and Stations. 

Sacramento-Stockton-Modesto is DMA No. 20. 

Streaming services are set to have an outsized impact on this year’s election coverage, both in terms of audience size and in the contributions they will make to more traditional broadcast coverage.

“There has been a lot of speculation about streaming in the news business but this year has shown that streaming is taking hold in a big way,” said Seni Tienabeso, executive producer of ABC News Live Prime, a primetime streaming show anchored by Linsey Davis. “The pandemic has really accelerated what was already happening in terms of people looking for other avenues to watch news, and you can see that in the audience growth. We had over 9 million people alone watching ABC News Live for the first debate. That is a huge number that ranks with any other broadcast.” 

Tienabeso and others said the streaming services are providing audiences with a much wider array of stories and coverage than viewers have ever seen. 

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Users who open the CBS News app will be able to access 12 different live feeds from 24-hour streaming service CBSN, said Christy Tanner, executive VP and general manager of CBS News Digital. They include a live feed of the CBS broadcast coverage, the national CBSN feed and 10 local feeds from CBS’s owned stations. 

“This will give us enormous flexibility in covering live events, races and outcomes simultaneously,” Tanner said.

To make it easier for viewers to find breaking news and content, CBS is launching a new capability to provide live, interactive alerts. “Viewers will get an interactive graphic on the screen when something is breaking and they will be able to use their remote to navigate to it,” Tanner said. 

Streaming services will also give audiences additional
ways to access network feeds on authenticated apps, streaming services or YouTube, where PBS NewsHour will be streaming election coverage. 

Univision will stream its national broadcast coverage starting at 7 p.m. ET on Nov. 3, senior politics editor Carlos Chirinos said, with digital teams filling breaks in the network coverage with original digital content. 

“We will be providing a heavy focus on the local level, because all politics is local,” Chirinos said. 

RELATED: The New Math of Election Coverage

The continuous nature of streaming services also gives news organizations more space and time to explain what promises to be a very complex election. “If you are just approaching this like a horse race for 12, 24, 36 hours or however [long] this goes on, that isn’t helpful to voters,” ABC News Live executive producer Katie den Daas said. “We’re preparing for the long haul so that people can turn on ABC News Live and get the kind of information they want.” 

Part of that will be improved data analytics. Journalists from the ABC News-owned polling analysis website FiveThirtyEight.com will appear on ABC News Live, den Daas said. “They will be able to explain what is happening and why,” she said. “As we inch closer to election and we are inundated with numbers and polling, they’ll be able to really frame and discuss what those numbers might mean or not mean.” 

On election night, Newsy will draw extensively on its investigative and longer-form reporting on such subjects as voting by mail, the ballot-counting process, voter suppression concerns, the integrity of the election and the Hispanic vote, Matt Simon, supervising producer for PM content at Newsy, said. 

“It is easy to go to roundtables of pundits and much harder to produce analysis that is based on fact and data and still find a way to make it compelling and interesting but that is our mission,” Simon said. 

Pandemic-related restrictions have also prompted networks to adopt much more coordinated strategies between their various platforms.

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Fox News will have a separate control room, said VP of politics and the Washington Bureau Cherie Grzech, from which she will talk to TV, digital and radio reporters, then route feeds to the various control rooms handling Fox News Channel, Fox Business Network, Fox Nation and Fox News Radio. 

“You will see reporters on multiple platforms throughout the evening,” Grzech said. “We are definitely trying to maximize the ability to move our people from one Fox platform to another.” 

Over the last six months, a perfect storm has swept across the news business, radically changing or even obliterating the traditional playbook for election coverage. 

The pandemic has killed off campaign rallies, reduced the conventions to a somber virtual shell of the usual festivities and is threatening to rewrite the script for election-night coverage, as news organizations prepare to handle mail-in ballots and voter suppression problems that may prolong their coverage into what one news executive referred to as “election results month.”  

Not surprisingly, the 20 news executives interviewed for this report are calling the 2020 election “unprecedented,” “like no other,” “unimaginable” and “completely bizarre.”

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“Usually in the latter part of the election year, the election is the story, sometimes the only major story,” said Sam Feist, CNN’s Washington, D.C., bureau chief. “But this year that is not the case. The election is competing with COVID and our national reckoning on race and policing.”

The magnitude of these problems — the largest racial-justice protests in half a century, an economic collapse that sent gross domestic product into a 33% tailspin in the second quarter and a pandemic that has killed nearly 160,000 people — is also prompting news executives to make radical changes in their election and political coverage.

Most notably, that has put issues front and center in the election cycle, as opposed to the usual horse race coverage of stump speeches, rallies and campaign strategies.

“The issues we are dealing with in many ways are bigger than the election,” said Martha MacCallum, who is co-anchoring Fox News Channel’s election coverage and anchors The Story. “People have a strong sense of the gravity of this moment and they are looking to President Trump and former Vice President Biden to provide leadership and answers on those issues.”

Similar sentiments can be found at most other news organizations. “In 2016, there was a big focus on the horse race between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton and the back-and-forth of that popularity and unpopularity contest,” Justin Dial, senior executive producer at the ABC News Live streaming service, said. “But in 2020, viewers are more interested in the issues. You have to get beyond the horse race and really dig into the issues.”

Significant as it may be, news organizations are not solely focused on the election. “We are devoting the vast majority of our journalism resources to the pandemic, the fragile economy and the racial-justice movement that are top of mind with voters,” Newsy VP of news and programming Christina Hartman said. “In that sense, this will be the first election where the majority of our election coverage is not explicitly about the election.”

Home Alone

Covering these once-in-a-lifetime issues has created enormous challenges. About 95% of the staff at NBC News and MSNBC is working from home, the network said. “It’s changed the way we produce and broadcast our news programs and report from the campaign trail,” Rashida Jones, senior VP of NBC News and MSNBC, said.

But many news executives also stress that the work-from-home environment has provided them with a welcome opportunity to rethink the way they tell stories. “If you look back four years ago, I think the mistake our industry made was to focus too much on the personalities and the tweets,” E.W. Scripps VP of news Sean McLaughlin said. “What people missed was that there were a lot of unhappy people.

“This time around, we are doing a better job of listening,” he said. “We are tackling it differently and packaging it differently. And I like that, because it is not about responding to a convention or a press conference or following the candidate on campaign trails where we listen to the same canned speeches. It is better journalism and better for the American election cycle.”

One major example of how news organizations are taking a different tack on election coverage can be found in the coverage of the racial justice issues and in the role that Hispanics are likely to play in the election. (See sidebar, page 10.) “The projection is that about 32 million Latinos will be eligible to vote this time,” Univision VP of politics Lourdes Torres said.

That is making their experiences a center­piece not only for Spanish-language 

networks, but all news outlets. “We saw a huge increase in turnout among Latinos in 2018 in key states,” Torres said. “In 2020, how they engage with the candidates will be very interesting and important to the election.”

Younger viewers want those vital social issues covered in-depth. “In some sense, this is the election we’ve been working towards at Vice for a long time,” Susie Banikarim, executive VP and global head of news­gathering at Vice News, said. “Vice has been deeply embedded in issues like racial justice for a long time. We have a young audience that doesn’t come to us for the traditional horse-race coverage or pundits shouting at each other. So we really feel like we’re leaning into things that we’ve been covering for a long time.”

Local First

With the pandemic imposing travel restrictions on coverage, having local reporters or ties to TV stations is another key trend. (See sidebar, page 11.) “We now have 10 local versions of CBSN and those have been augmenting what we are already doing in terms of going deeper into local politics,” Christy Tanner, executive VP and general manager of CBS News Digital, said.

Having that extra coverage in swing states “has been a real differentiator” for the streaming service, she said.

“When we built our political team two years ago, we set it up to have reporters all around the country,” Associated Press Washington bureau chief Julie Pace said. “We wanted to make certain that we had people who were living in a lot of these states that were going to decide the election and that our coverage wasn’t just reflecting the inside-the-Beltway chatter. That has been a huge advantage now that you can’t have people flying around.”

Similarly, ABC News and NBC News have launched initiatives focusing on issues and politics in swing states. “Once the campaigning stopped because of the virus, we directed the teams embedded with the candidates to cover issues, starting with the economic issues from the shutdown and then racial disparity,” said Wendy Fisher, VP, newsgathering, ABC News. “Now, the same group of people are focusing on the big issues in certain battleground states.”

Chuck Todd, moderator of Meet the Press and NBC News political director, explained in an email that in November 2019, “we launched a year-long project focusing on five bellwether counties [in Wisconsin,
Michigan, Pennsylvania, Arizona and Florida] across the country to better understand what’s happening on a hyper-local level … to better understand what we think will define what happens in November.”

Unconventional Conventions

Viewers will also see major changes in this year’s convention coverage. Unlike 2016, when the razzle dazzle of the conventions was over by July, the Republican and Democratic National Conventions will be mostly virtual when they finally happen later this month. All of the major news organizations have dramatically cut back their presence in Charlotte, North Carolina, and Milwaukee, the RNC and DNC cities, respectively.

ABC News will anchor the conventions from New York, using two control rooms so social-distancing rules can be followed, senior executive producer for special events Marc Burstein said. A reduced presence in the convention cities doesn’t make the event less important, he stressed. 

“You hear the argument that no news
is made at the conventions so why bother with them,” he said. “I don’t subscribe to that at all. With the issues the country is facing right now with the coronavirus and the economic decline and the racial unrest, the conventions will provide voters with plans for how each party plans to tackle these problems and what the country is going to look like under a Democratic president or a Republican president.”

Others stress a similar point. CBS News political director Caitlin Conant noted that in recent months, “major issues regarding the pandemic, the economy and widespread protests have overshadowed some political issues.” As a result, CBS political reporters have been spending more time on those issues, producing such content as the “COVID Chronicles” series of reports.

“The conventions are going to be a big moment for the campaigns,” she said. “It will let the candidates basically reintroduce themselves to America and bring the focus back to politics.”

Conant and others also stressed that the revamped conventions offer news organizations an opportunity to rethink how they cover the issues that matter to voters. “It opens up a different thought process of how you approach the convention,” explained Fox News VP of politics and the Washington, D.C., bureau Cherie Grzech. “It means you can bring in players from every state virtually, rather than having everyone in one location, so it gives us a lot more options to get more experts and guests involved in the coverage.” 

Digital All-Stars

This year’s election coverage will also highlight the maturity and central importance of streaming and digital media. ABC News, for one, is planning one program for both linear TV and live streaming on the ABC News Live app for the conventions. “It won’t be like it was eight years ago, where only some people are on the network and there is another cast of characters on the digital live stream,” Burstein said. “We haven’t decided what will be streamed and what will be on the TV network, but it will be one show and we’ll have what I call our ‘A’ team on the digital live stream.”

More fundamentally, the renewed emphasis on issues will dovetail with the fact that streaming apps like CBSN, Newsy, Vice, NBC News, and ABC News Live have long focused on fact-based reporting of issues, investigative journalism and long-form documentaries. “This election year is going to be like no other we’ve ever seen, with people desperate for straightforward reporting and unbiased news and information,” noted Dial at ABC News Live. Since January 2020, it has been attracting about 20 million monthly viewers, up 142% according to ABC, with over 4.5 million hours streamed each week.

In addition to their long-standing focus on issues, executives at the major streaming outlets also stressed that their digital origins help in adapting to the pandemic-related restrictions on travel and reporting. “We were already interviewing people over Zoom and we already had very flexible operations that have helped us when we were first faced with the restrictions produced by the pandemic,” said Tanner at CBS News Digital

Election Month? 

Such flexibility will be important on election night, which may not follow any traditional script for analyzing the results. “We are working very hard right now to prepare ourselves so we’re up to speed on all the scenarios, both legal and logistical, that could occur in terms of voting rights, voter suppression and the vote counting,” CBS News’s Conant said.

Pointing to a recent podcast by chief Washington correspondent Major Garrett on some of the potential issues that might arise from voting during the pandemic, she added, “We need to be prepared if this is election week or election month.”

Even the look and feel of this election night coverage may be different, as the major networks and news organizations try to figure out how to stage election-night coverage during a pandemic. CNN’s Feist noted that they will be spreading talent over a wider area in additional studios and that their ongoing move towards new technical infrastructures has allowed them to have many people working from home who would normally be sitting in control rooms.

CNN has also significantly upgraded its data analytics for correspondent John King’s “Magic Wall” presentations and will be greatly expanding the amount of data it makes available online. This is notable because news organizations have been working overtime to figure out how to do a better job of handling data and avoiding some of the inaccurate predictions made during the 2016 election campaign.

“How you are describing the polls and what that means for the election is always a fairly complicated process,” noted Micah Cohen, managing editor, FiveThirtyEight. “In 2016, polls showed Clinton up by three or four points nationally, yet the race was being described by many journalists as a runaway for Clinton. That was a mistake, not on the polls but on the people interpreting the polls.”

This time around, Cohen sees the efforts by organizations like ABC News, which owns FiveThirtyEight, to beef up their data offerings and analytics as a welcome development. “I think people are doing better, but some aren’t and some are drawing the wrong conclusion that we can’t trust the polls at all,” Cohen said.

How well news organizations maintain their focus on these and other pressing issues remains to be seen. But most remain optimistic that the once-in-a-lifetime troubles could produce some of the industry’s best journalism in the 21st century.

“Anyone can follow a candidate spewing a stump speech,” said McLaughlin at Scripps. “Really digging in and following the money, and fact-checking and figuring out what is really going on and holding people accountable, is never easy, and these are not the easiest of circumstances to do that … But it’s never been more important. It’s our time
to shine.”

ViacomCBS tapped Verizon Media as the preferred supply side platform for its CBSN and ET Live streaming services.

The move comes amid big increases in advertising on connected TV.

“CTV is seeing significant growth,” said Iván Markman, chief business officer at Verizon Media. “We are uniquely positioned to help premium CTV publishers like CBS News Digital meet that opportunity, giving them access to leading advertisers who use our ad platform to uniquely plan, buy and measure the impact across all media campaigns. This relationship reinforces our commitment to supporting editorially-driven inventory in a connected, omnichannel environment.”

CBSN is a streaming news service from CBS News. ET Live offers entertainment news 24/7. Commercial inventory for both networks is now available to media buyers through the Verizon Media DSP or Verizon Media Exchange.

“At Verizon Media, we are designing our solutions and platforms to provide the utmost value to publishers and advertisers,” continued Markman. “This partnership furthers our investment in growing channels, specifically CTV, and in delivering best in class video and content experiences to advertisers and consumers. It also showcases our commitment to the third-party partner ecosystem and making our publisher partners successful.”

The national news networks are in a curious place these days. Their partisan leanings, real or alleged, have come to define who they are. And of late, it often seems they are more interested in tattling on each other’s missteps than the actual events of the day.

All of which creates the opportunity for someone to come in and offer a different type of national news network.

Someone like CBSN with its combination of national stories and in-depth local coverage.

Local Still Matters
As the coronavirus pandemic exploded, viewers quickly realized the biggest limitation of the national news networks they initially turned to: They had little (if any) coverage of local stories and the pandemic was most definitely unfurling on a local level.

Viewership on local TV newscasts shot up, particularly among the younger demographic. And suddenly everybody remembered why they liked the local news shows with their excess of cheerful banter and dearth of partisan sniping.

In order to watch your local TV news show, of course, you need to have either a pay TV subscription or an antenna. 

That is likely to become a problem over the next few months because there is going to be rapid uptick in cord cutting due to the massive levels of unemployment. 

And by “rapid uptick” I mean we’ll go from 2%-3% of subscribers totally abandoning pay TV to something closer to 10%. Not the “massive wave” the Silicon Valley trades keep blathering about, but a significant increase nonetheless. 

Similarly, while antenna usage and over-the-air reception has indeed gone up over the past several years, installing an HD antenna is often beyond the technical acumen of large segments of the population. And even if it’s not, it quickly becomes a hassle as you need to switch inputs every time you want to watch your favorite streaming services . 

In other words, the market for cable and over the air local broadcast news is shrinking.

Which leaves OTT.

This is serendipitous because the main downside for users dumping pay TV for a strict diet of Flixes (aka SVOD services) and FASTS (free ad-supported streaming TV services) is that they have limited access to local news.

Enter CBSN, CBS News’s free OTT app, which has been launching local news feeds for all its owned and operated stations. The local broadcasts live as channels within the greater CBS News app and feature the kind of in-depth local reporting people want to see right now. 

This is a smart move, as having the local broadcast on the same app with CBS’s national broadcast also gives viewers a free and trustworthy way to learn about national and international news stories. It also helps promote the CBS News brand, which not that long ago, was the gold standard for television news reporting and has a real opportunity to reclaim the mantle as a trusted nonpartisan source. 

So is this the future of TV news?
While the pieces are all in place for CBSN to take off, there are still many roadblocks in its way. 

The main one is that the service is currently limited to CBS’s owned and operated stations and thus leaves out a ton of non-O&O local affiliates, which, by law, make up 61% of the stations running CBS prime-time programming. 

This is a real issue in that there are complex legal arrangements that might prevent the affiliates from striking a deal to put their news shows on the CBS News app. 

In addition to complex retrans agreements with the MVPDs, many affiliates are part of larger station groups,  and those groups may have their own apps (e.g., Sinclair’s STIRR) which would prevent them from taking part in the CBS app.

Finally, there’s the fact that prior to the pandemic, TV news skewed towards an older demographic, one that was not particularly inclined to use OTT apps. 

And while not having any money because you’ve been unemployed for the past several months can be a great motivator of innovation, the CBSN app will need to find ways to appeal to younger users in order to keep growing.

This means using a different formula than the one that has driven the first wave of news services which seem to mostly turn off younger viewers. 

An All OTT Future
One final factor in all this is that the MVPDs are not necessarily wedded to their current pay TV set-up, one they are making an increasingly lower percentage of their overall profits from.

It’s definitely within the range of possibility that they will start bundling broadband with some combination of Flixes and offering that to consumers along with a free streaming device to watch it all on. (Comcast, for instance, recently noted it had given away one million Flex streaming devices to its broadband only customers .)

In a universe like this, FASTS like CBSN will likely come pre-installed on the device. And if it’s a choice between a free service that offers local news and having to pay for a CNN or FoxNews, I suspect many consumers, younger ones in particular will opt for the former option.

The new app also gives a huge boost to local stations, making their news shows accessible to larger segments of the population, providing them with access to CBSN’s addressable advertising inventory, and allowing them to spread their creative wings by creating news and “news adjacent” shows for the local segments of the apps.

A renaissance of local journalism would be a positive development for the US too, as there are already too many “news deserts” where local news sources are limited. 

For if there is one thing we’ve already learned from this pandemic, it’s that what happens locally is every bit as important as what happens nationally. CBSN and similar services could be the way to make that pay off.

CBS had to switch to a feed from its 24/7 over-the-top news site, CBSN, when it had technical issues with CBS Evening News with Norah O'Donnell Tuesday (May 19).

The newscast time slot (6:30-7) began with a series of show promos, then a hard cut to the CBSN feed for the duration of the half hour.

A CBS News source confirmed that there was an issue out of the D.C. control room, where the newscast is produced. The Broadcast Center in New York is closed and there are skeleton crews working out of the D.C. bureau and a backup control room in New York.

"CBS News experienced technical difficulties tonight that prevented the CBS Evening News from airing at 6:30 pm, ET on the CBS Television Network," the network said in a statement. "The issue is being resolved, and the Mountain and West Coast versions of the CBS Evening News will air during the regular time slots at 5:30 PM/6:30 PM, MT/PT. In place of the CBS Evening News on the East Coast, the network aired coverage from CBSN, CBS News’ streaming news service.

"Tonight's broadcast of the CBS Evening News will also air on CBSN and will be available on CBSNews.com."

CBS Television Stations and CBS Interactive haved launched CBSN Dallas-Fort Worth, the 10th of ViacomCBS’ 13 local direct-to-consumer streaming news services. CBSN Dallas-Fort Worth features anchored programming and coverage of breaking news in the region, produced by KTVT. 

The first local CBSN platform was CBSN New York late in 2018. Following were CBSN Local services in Los Angeles, Boston, San Francisco Bay Area, Minnesota, Philadelphia, Denver, Pittsburgh and Chicago. Remaining within the group are platforms representing the group’s Miami, Sacramento and Baltimore stations.

“We are extremely pleased with the success of our first nine CBSN Local services and look forward to going 10-for-10 with the launch of CBSN Dallas-Fort Worth,” said Peter Dunn, President, CBS Television Stations. “The demand for premium news content on streaming platforms is strong and will be a driver of our future success.”

CBSN Dallas-Fort Worth is available through CBSN, at CBSNews.com and CBSDFW.com, and on the CBS News app. 

“The launch of CBSN Dallas-Fort Worth is a landmark event in CBS 11’s history,” said Gary Schneider, president and general manager, KTVT and KTXA. “We are excited to be able to make our award-winning local news content available to consumers–both here in North Texas and across the country–whenever and wherever they want to watch. We appreciate the support we have received from CBS Television Stations and CBS Interactive and look forward to using this new platform to grow our business.”

The Writers Guild of America East (WGAE) said it has negotiated the first contract with CBSN, which the guild said marks the first anchored live streaming service to be unionized.

The agreement was unanimously ratified by more than 65 staffers in the guild-represented CBSN employee bargaining unit and appears to be a major "payoff" as it were, for the bargaining unit's efforts, starting with a 3% raise per year for all unionized CBSN staff.

According to WGAE, the agreement also includes substantial salary "improvements" for "short turn-around pay, standby pay, and extra pay for long work weeks for all employees," as well as upgrades for "employees assigned to perform work ordinarily performed by people in higher-paid titles, extra paid days off, a system for getting paid for unused comp days, holiday pay, and substantial severance pay."

And there was more.

The agreement includes recruiting a more diverse workforce, including creating a diversity committee and committees looking into working conditions and workloads.

"Employees in the lower-paid classifications will receive time and a half overtime plus penalties for working through meal periods," said WGAE, adding: "The agreement streamlines current job titles and includes clear job descriptions and minimum pay rates for all titles."

“CBSN represents the future of live news, and we are very pleased to have negotiated an excellent contract," said WGAE executive director Lowell Peterson, who was the chief negotiator and gave a shout-out to the other side. "Our hard-working and dedicated bargaining committee made a compelling case to management on all of the top priority issues," he said, adding: "To the company’s credit, their negotiators and managers took these concerns seriously and agreed to provisions addressing all of them."

Unionized CBS News broadcast operations and drama and comedy writers all expressed solidarity with CBSN colleagues, said WGAE, including signing petitions and tweeting their support.

CBS TV stations has added Denver as its seventh market for a local streaming version of its CBSN 24/7 online news service.

CBSN Denver joins similar CBS ad-supported OTT news services in New York, Los Angeles, Boston, San Francisco, Minnesota and Philadelphia. It will stream CBS' KCNC-TV newscasts and breaking news coverage as well as its own anchored programming and an on-demand library of news content.

CBSN Pittsburgh is expected to debut later this month, with Chicago, Dallas-Fort Worth, Miami, Sacramento and Baltimore, the other markets where it has owned TV stations, expected to come online over the next few months.

Related: Good News for Digital News

“CBS 4 does a terrific job of ‘covering Colorado first.’ As the state prepares to hold its first presidential primary in two decades, this is a perfect time to broaden the reach of the station’s award-winning news coverage by launching CBSN Denver,” said CBS Television Stations president Peter Dunn in a statement. “The response to our first six launches is exceeding our expectations, and we look forward to seeing this trend continue in Denver and the six other markets where we will be rolling out these OTT services in the near future.”

CBS TV stations has added Denver as its seventh market for a local streaming version of its CBSN 24/7 online news service.

CBSN Denver joins similar CBS ad-supported OTT news services in New York, Los Aangeles, Boston, San Francisco, Minnesota and Philadelphia. It will stream CBS' KCNC-TV newscasts and breaking news coverage as well as its own anchored programming and an on-demand library of news content.

CBSN Pittsburgh is expected to debut later this month, with Chicago, Dallas-Fort Worth, Miami, Sacramento and Baltimore, the other markets where it has owned TV stations, expected to come online over the next few months.

“CBS 4 does a terrific job of ‘covering Colorado first.’ As the state prepares to hold its first presidential primary in two decades, this is a perfect time to broaden the reach of the station’s award-winning news coverage by launching CBSN Denver,” said CBS Television Stations president Peter Dunn in a statement. “The response to our first six launches is exceeding our expectations, and we look forward to seeing this trend continue in Denver and the six other markets where we will be rolling out these OTT services in the near future.”

CBS Television Stations and CBS Interactive have launched CBSN Philly, the sixth of ViacomCBS’ 13 planned local direct-to-consumer streaming news services in major markets. CBSN Philly features anchored news programming, coverage of live breaking-news events and a library of local news content available on demand.

CBS owns KYW and WSPG in DMA No. 4. CBSN Philly’s lineup includes live streams of KYW’s newscasts and coverage of breaking news. 

CBSN New York debuted in December 2018. CBSN Los Angeles arrived in June 2019, CBSN Boston premiered in September 2019, CBSN San Francisco Bay Area came in November 2019 and CBSN Minnesota turned up last month. 

“It is very exciting to reach the mid-point of the rollout of our CBSN Local services with today’s launch of CBSN Philly,” said Peter Dunn, president, CBS Television Stations. “We have learned so much during our five previous launches and now have the structure in place to accelerate our rollout plan and go live in all of our markets within the next few months.”

CBSN Pittsburgh is scheduled to make its debut in February. During the next few months, ViacomCBS plans to launch CBSN Local services in Chicago, Dallas-Ft. Worth, Denver, Miami, Sacramento and Baltimore.

CBSN Local platforms are ad-supported. 

“Everyone here at CBS Philly is excited to have the opportunity to serve the demand for local news on streaming platforms,” said Brandin Stewart, president and general manager, KYW-WSPG. “We look forward to making our premium local news content available to consumers, both here in the Delaware Valley and across the country, whenever and wherever they want.”

CBS News’ streaming network CBSN premiered late in 2014. 

Democratic impeachment managers used clips from various video streams in arguments for how the rules for the Senate impeachment trial of President Donald Trump should be drawn up, including that there should be access to White House documents.

The trial began "in earnest" Tuesday (Jan. 21), itself streamed across multiple platforms.

Impeachment manager Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) played testimony from news streaming site CBSN and USA Today online impeachment coverage to argue that the White House has significant documents that the Senate should get access to.

Republicans want the trial to be confined to documents that the House was able to use in its impeachment inquiry and witnesses that appeared in the House hearings. Democrats say the trial must include new documents and witnesses, particularly since the reason some of that material and testimony was not in the House inquiry was that the White House blocked it.

As it did for the House impeachment inquiry, Fox-owned WTTG TV Washington chose to use online streaming for its live news coverage of the Senate trial, while running regular syndicated and network fare on the broadcast signal.

While fake news continues to compete successfully with real journalism in capturing audiences around the world, digital news has emerged as a surprisingly bright spot for traditional journalistic values, with new business models funding better news content.

Some of this simply reflects the old cliché about a rising tide that floats all boats. The hotly contested 2020 elections and impeachment coverage have already produced growing audiences.

In November, CNN’s total-day ratings from Nielsen climbed to their third-highest level in 11 years, while MSNBC grew its total-day viewers audience by 18% from a year earlier.

For the full year, Fox News Channel notched its highest-rated year in primetime in its 23-year history, with an average of 2.5 million viewers, per Nielsen.

An even bigger surge of viewing can be found on digital platforms. Fox News Digital had 102 million monthly uniques, up 11% from the prior year.

“People are consuming more news than ever before,” Fox News Digital editor-in-chief Porter Berry said. “With channel viewership and all metrics of digital up in 2019, Fox News is proving that growth in one area doesn’t have to come at the expense of another.”

Video — particularly live video — is one of the fastest-growing segments, said CNN Digital VP of global video Wendy Brundige. CNN had 542 million unique multiplatform video starts in September 2019, Brundige said.

“Video has become ubiquitous,” she said. “There is an expectation that if something newsworthy has happened in front of a camera, we will have it for them … So if you open up the CNN app you will see it chock full of video.”

Paul Shanley, global director of video products for the Associated Press, also stressed the importance of multiplatform news coverage and production. “The traditional lines of how we define news organizations are starting to blur,” he said. “All of these news organizations — radio, TV, print, digital — are now competing across platforms with video. We are really seeing a growing demand for multi-form content for multiple platforms and for immediate content, live content.”

Breaking the Bubble

While fake news and propaganda remains a major problem on social media platforms, a rarely noted trend is the increased popularity of nonpartisan news coverage via digital platforms such as CNN, NBC News, CBS News and Newsy.

VIEWER WATCH 2020:After the Fall

CBSN, CBS News’s 24-hour OTT channel, regularly produces more than 1 million streams a day, said Marc DeBevoise, chief digital officer of ViacomCBS and CEO of CBS Interactive. Total 2019 video streams also beat record levels set in 2018, notable in an off-election year.

The rapid growth of CBSN highlights a growing demand for live, unbiased hard news, CBS News Digital executive VP Christy Tanner said. “We are focused on fact, not opinion, and we have a younger audience [median age of 37 that] is choosing facts not opinion,” she said. “Many people are turned off by there being so much opinion on cable and the idea that people are living in filter bubbles.”

NBC News executive VP of digital Chris Berend agreed. A focus on nonpartisan news and facts has fueled both growth and engagement for the division’s NBC News Now app, which launched in June 2019.

Total hours streamed on the app have been growing at an average of 27% a month since launch. “We have an average session time of around 49 minutes on an average day,” with high levels even on special occasions such as the impeachment hearings, Berend said. “That is incredible engagement.”

“It is pretty clear from the research that there are a lot of people who are looking for news that — for the lack of a better term — is very Cronkite-esque, for news that exists outside the hyperpartisan bubble,” said Blake Sabatinelli, CEO of the E.W. Scripps-owned Newsy, which started as an online news service and now offers news via apps and online as well on a 24/7 cable news channel. “There is a gap in the marketplace that has led to rapid growth of this kind of coverage from us and a number of other digital players.”

Most news executives expect digital audiences, already at record levels, to hit new highs as election coverage heats up over the next year.

Fox News Digital’s Berry agreed: “The public’s appetite is insatiable, especially as we are heading into a major election. In terms of video, consumers want the ability to follow impeachment hearings, watch a viral video or view the day’s headlines wherever they are — from a crowded train in New York or on a tractor in Iowa.”

This reflects not only longstanding trends toward consumption of news on digital platforms. It also reflects a growing awareness that consumers can turn to digital news for immediate coverage not found anywhere else.

New Life for Live

“Consumers know that they can go to us for live coverage when other outlets aren’t turned on,” CBS News Digital’s Tanner said. “We’re building that capability to go live for five years and now we are at the place where we can go live on 10 p.m. on a Friday night when there is a mass shooting. That builds an expectation that viewers can come to services like ours soon as they find out something has happened.”

That will translate into much more live coverage in this election cycle. “There is a big push for more live coverage,” CNN’s Brundige said.

“We are in the midst of one of the craziest news cycles that anyone has ever seen,” she added. “One of our biggest challenges is that the news cycle is so relentless. We have to staff up for that and organize ourselves in a way to really leave no minute of the day uncovered.”

“Velocity is key,” Fox News Digital’s Berry added. “People need to be alerted to breaking news as soon as it happens. They may read in on the day’s events in the morning or during downtime, but during the rest of the day, they depend on reliable sites like ours to keep them informed as news happens.”

Fox News Digital, for example, ended the year with 2.5 billion video views, up 39% over 2018. It also saw multiplatform views jump 13% to 18.1 billion and multiplatform minutes includes to 43.1 billion up 38%

Another key development is improved multiplatform coverage of stories. This reflects the fact that traditional news organizations like CBS News, Fox News and NBC News are ramping up their OTT offerings on mobile, connected TVs and other platforms as well as online players like Newsy moving into traditional TV channels and outlets.

For example, Fox News launched the Fox Nation on-demand streaming platform in November of 2018 and over the last year added thousands of hours of content, with lifestyle and sports content more than doubling.

Newsy’s Sabatinelli noted that after its acquisition by Scripps, the platform launched its own 24/7 TV channel and started sharing content with the station group’s local outlets.

“OTT provides a TV-like environment and there are a greater number of people expecting these [OTT apps] to act more and more like regular channels,” Sabatinelli said. “Having the linear channel helps us program more effectively to a broader multiplatform ecosystem.

Multiplatform Politics

Providing better multiplatform storytelling has been a key strategy at AP that will play a major role in the content it provides its clients during the 2020 election. “As a result of the popularity of social media, we are seeing an increase in the need for immediate content,” said Shanley at AP. “News consumers want to see an event as it unfolds, live. So we have focused on structuring ourselves and getting the right tech in place to respond faster than ever before and increasingly our capability for live video.”

This has meant equipping their journalists with LiveU backpacks that allow them to stream video over mobile networks and with apps to live stream from their smartphones. In addition, the AP has moved to a cloud-based editing system, allowing its journalists to edit stories faster from almost any location.

At the same time, AP has revamped how it approaches stories to provide an array of content for multiple platforms for its clients, Shanley said. Often this means providing live coverage while also providing stories for mobile, social, TV and other platforms.

“We’ve been trying to meet those challenges by focusing on speed and getting content out to customers quickly while at the same time following up with stories that have more context and character driven stories,” to show the human impact of the event, he said.

“We have to approach any story as a cohesive comprehensive user experience,” added Brundige at CNN. “We are able to learn from our digital audiences to make sure we are able to get our journalism to them in the most impactful way and iterate that story as the audience changes and the technology changes.”

Mobile-First Is Still First

Among those platforms, mobile is still key. “The growth in our mobile audiences for video has been rapid,” Brundige said. “Five years, we thought of our video for digital really as a desktop audience first. Now video on mobile is a really great experience and we are thinking about mobile first and how to serve that audience with video.”

But that doesn’t mean simply focusing on short-form content. “People are using their phone from the minute they wake up to the minute they go to bed,” Tanner at CBS said. “So it is not surprising that they are comfortable watching news at length on their phones. The idea that people only want short-form content on their phones is a myth. When there is something compelling, they will watch for an hour.”

Rising consumption on connected TVs is also fueling growing demand for longer-form content and for apps that encourage longer viewing times by serving up a wheel of stories. “We and others are really seeing a move towards long engagement experiences,” said NBC’s Berend.

The news organization reports that users accessing the NBC News Now app on Amazon Fire TV averaged 63 minutes of view time per visit in November.

“If news happens in the middle of the day we are seeing audiences turn on an Apple TV or a Roku to find out what is going on,” he added. “We are seeing weekday, middle-of-the-day spikes in audience when by logic people are at work and not watching TVs.”

“There is an amazing amount of traffic on mobile, Berend added. “The vast majority of unique viewers come through a phone, but when it comes to watching live and when it comes to video or live video in particular, it is quickly moving towards the connected TV.”

This is good news for the economics of the news business. “Connected TVs have the advantage of tapping into an ad inventory we are very accustomed to selling,” Berend said.

Always Connected

Another example of the increasingly diverse array of content likely to be hit digital platforms during the 2020 elections is the growing popularity long form content. “We are seeing a growing demand for archival footage as our clients are producing more long-form content,” said Shanley at AP.

“We are now in our fourth year of producing [longer form] originals and they’ve grown every year — first six, then twelve and then 18 the past two years,” said Tanner at CBS.

This allows CBSN to dive deeply into topics and subjects that are often ignored in the frenzied news cycle, a tactic that will become even more important during the election. CBSN recently aired its 50th original documentary.

One of these, A Climate Reckoning in the Heartland, covered the impact of climate change on farmers in the Midwest. “It was our most popular documentary of the year,” Tanner noted. “The numbers were 150% over our typical original.”

Several of the digital news organizations are also expanding their local content, which will allow them to provide better coverage of developments in key states during 2020.

For example, CBS News Digital has already rolled out local streams from their owned stations in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Boston into its CBSN app.

“We’ll have nine additional local streams in the first part of 2020,” Tanner said. “So much of the 2020 election is going to require intimate knowledge of what is happening in state and local races and in the regional and local nuances as it related to the national election. Having 13 local streams means that we are to be providing much more granular insights not only to those who live in the region but others outside those areas.”

Newsy’s Sabatinelli agreed. “Being acquired by Scripps means that we can tap into a tremendous network of newsgathering operations at 60 stations in 42 markets and share content back and forth,” he said. “Having a station in a large majority of the top 25 markets means that our footprint is better and us being a national news network means that Scripps’ footprint is bigger.”

The growing popularity of these apps also highlights a generally positive trend towards more objective journalism on digital platforms like CBSN, NBC News Now, CNN and Newsy.

Panel discussion and partisan debates “are certainly a staple on cable news outlets,” said Berend at NBC News. “We have purposefully positioned NBC News Now right down the middle and very based it on expertise and field reporting and having people on the ground. It is much more about the newsgathering footprint than about studio chat.”

The fact that many people are taking the trouble to find and use these app. means that the demand for more non-partisan coverage continues to grow, Berend and others believe.

“OTT app users are true superfans,” said Sabatinelli at Newsy. “They made a choice, not just to turn you on but to find the app, download it and to install it.”

These superfans, he said, are hungry for nonpartisan news focusing on the issues. “We have no pundits or opinion commentary or large desks of people arguing with each other,” Sabatinelli, CEO of Newsy, continued. “From the moment you turn us on, you’ll see something that looks very different. From an actual coverage perspective it is really about stripping away surface ideas and digging into real policy positions of the candidates so that the viewer has a better understanding of what they are voting for and make a decision for themselves. That comes down to the core tenets of why we get into journalism in the first place.” 

CBS Television Stations and CBS Interactive have launched CBSN Minnesota, the fifth of CBS’ 13 local direct-to-consumer streaming news services across the country. CBS owns WCCO in Minneapolis-St. Paul. CBSN Minnesota features anchored programming, live breaking news and a library of local news content available on demand. 

“WCCO has for many years had an outstanding legacy in local news and serving the community. We are very happy to broaden its reach from local to national by making the station’s premium local content available on our streaming platform,” said Peter Dunn, president, CBS Television Stations.

Streaming news platform CBSN launched late in 2014. 

CBSN New York was the first in the group to launch, a year ago. CBSN Los Angeles, CBSN Boston and CBSN San Francisco Bay Area have followed. CBSN Philadelphia is scheduled to debut in January. By early 2020, CBS plans to launch CBSN Local services in the seven remaining markets where it has a station: Chicago, Dallas-Ft. Worth, Denver, Miami, Sacramento, Pittsburgh and Baltimore. 

“Research shows strong demand for OTT content here in the Twin Cities,” said Ann Ouellette, VP and general manager, WCCO. “We are thrilled to have this opportunity to make our award-winning news programming available, both here at home and across the country, for people to watch on their favorite platforms whenever and wherever they want the latest news from WCCO.”

Even as CBS and Viacom's proposed merger moved closer to fruition Tuesday (Oct. 29), CBS primetime and late-night series writers represented by the Writers Guild of America, East (WGAE) have signed a petition urging CBS/Viacom to finalize a "fair" contract with newly unionized CBSN staffers. 

CBSN is CBS' 24-hour streaming news network. 

Related: WGAE Strikes New Contracts with Vice 

The petition was delivered to CBS by none other than WGAE Executive Director Lowell Peterson and came on the fifth day of collective bargaining in negotiations that began in June.  

“We are one union," said Peterson. "The solidarity of our members who craft drama and comedy means a lot to our unit members at CBSN, who are gearing up for a busy 2020 and expect their real concerns to be addressed by the company.” 

CBSN unionized with WGAE back in February, which the union billed as the first major digital live-streaming service to unionize. 

CBS and the union have had a relationship since broadcast journalists at the network joined the union when it was first formed in 1954. 

The more than 75 writers to sign the petition included for CBS series Blue Bloods, City on a Hill, FBI: Most Wanted, Instinct, The Good Fight, Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Our Cartoon President and Tommy. 

The petition reads: 

"As members of the Writers Guild of America, East (WGAE) and writers/producers working with ViacomCBS, we are proud to support our fellow union members at CBSN who are negotiating their first union contract. They have made reasonable proposals to ensure fair working conditions and to protect the integrity of their bargaining unit. We call on CBS to respond accordingly and reach an agreement that respects the terrific work of the writers, producers, and graphic artists at CBSN. 

"It has been a tumultuous few years at CBS, but we are proud of the incredible work of WGAE members at CBS News and their dedication to a fair workplace—now it’s time for their colleagues at CBSN to have their voices heard. 

"The staff at CBSN have shown tremendous courage to stand up for one another and we have their back—it’s time for a fair contract."

CBS has launched the third of its 13 planned major market DTC (direct to consumer) news services, CBSN Boston.

CBSN New York launched in 2018, L.A. in June and a fourth, San Francisco is scheduled to launch in the fourth quarter of this year. The news sites include "24/7 anchored programming, coverage of live breaking news events and an extensive library of local news content that will be available for on-demand viewing."

CBS is launching the services where it also owns TV stations with local news operations it can leverage. CBS says it plans to launch in the remaining markets by next year, those being Chicago, Dallas-Ft. Worth, Philadelphia, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Denver, Miami, Sacramento, Pittsburgh and Baltimore.

CBSN Boston will include a live stream of WBZ-TV's regular newscasts and added newscasts exclusively for the platform. CBSN Boston will also air an 8 p.m. newscast simulcast on CBS-owned WSBK-TV Boston.

“The combined resources of CBS Television Stations and CBS Interactive are placing our CBSN Local services at the forefront of addressing consumers’ interest in receiving local, relevant and useful information on all platforms,” said Adam Wiener, EVP and GM of CBS Local Digital Media. “With today’s launch in Boston we continue moving forward with an accelerated plan to launch CBSN Local services in all of our local news markets.”

The ad-supported CBSN sites will eventually be added to CBS All Access in their respective markets, the company says. CBS has been a leader in moving expanding its distribution model to the Web.

Tanya Rivero has been named an anchor at CBSN, CBS News’ streaming service, effective Sept. 9.

Rivero, who had been a freelance anchor and reporter for CBSN, anchored the service’s live coverage of the Mueller report and had one of the first interviews with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) before she was elected to Congress.

Before CBS News, Rivero was anchor of Lunch Break with Tanya Rivero on WSJ Live. She also worked as an anchor and correspondent for ABC News.

She began her journalism career at WCBS-TV, New York. Before that, she was a dancer with the New York City Ballet.

CBS Television Stations and CBS Interactive are accelerating their rollout of CBSN Local, the company’s direct-to-consumer streaming news service, in all 13 owned markets.

CBSN New York debuted in December and CBSN Los Angeles in June.

CBSN Boston is next, and CBSN San Francisco Bay Area is scheduled for a fourth quarter release.

CBS Television Stations’ remaining nine markets will premiere their CBSN Local products in early 2020.

CBSN Local services have 24/7 anchored programming, coverage of live local news and a library of local news content on demand. They are ad-supported.

“The early success of CBSN New York and CBSN Los Angeles has exceeded our expectations,” said Peter Dunn, president, CBS Television Stations. “It is clear there is significant demand for high-quality local news coverage on streaming services, and we are moving forward with excitement as we prepare to launch CBSN Local services in all 13 of our local news markets. Our accelerated rollout schedule ensures launches in all of these markets ahead of the 2020 political primaries and elections.”

CBS announced earnings Aug. 8.

Besides its stations in New York, Los Angeles, Boston and the Bay Area, CBS’ owned stations include WBBM Chicago, KTVT Dallas-Fort Worth, KYW-WPSG Philadelphia, WCCO Minneapolis-St. Paul, KCNC Denver, WFOR Miami, KOVR-KMAX Sacramento, KDKA-WPCW Pittsburgh and WJZ Baltimore.

“The collaboration between CBS Television Stations and CBS Interactive, coupled with the enthusiastic response from the teams at our local stations, has created a winning combination, both for CBS and the millions of viewers we serve,” said Adam Wiener, executive VP and general manager of CBS Local Digital Media. “We are excited to address the rising demand for local, relevant and useful information on all platforms by leveraging our existing local news assets to dramatically expand the distribution of CBSN Local services.”

CBSN launched in November 2014. CBSN Local services are available through CBSN, CBSNews.com and through the CBS News app.

“Access to reliable local news is a priority for our audiences from coast to coast,” said Christy Tanner, executive VP and general manager of CBS News Digital. 

NBCUniversal, which has been quietly testing an ad-supported news streaming platform, will officially launch its OTT service in early May, the company said at SXSW Festival in Austin, Texas.

The service, which has been operating in test mode under the name NBC News Signal, will be called NBC News Now.

“It will be something you can access on Apple TV or Roku or any of those other boxes. We are going to launch with 8 hours of programming, including live updates at the top of every hour, and when breaking news mandates, we’ll go up live as well,” Noah Oppenheim, president of NBC News, told reporters. “So, for folks who don’t have a traditional cable subscription it will be a great way to access the reporting of NBC News.”

The free-to-consumer service will be available over the top to none pay TV subscribers, Oppenheim added. “So, for folks who don’t have a traditional cable subscription it will be a great way to access the reporting of NBC News,” he said.

The service will also feature content from various NBCU linear platforms, many of them not hard-news-oriented.

“We will actually be reaching into other corners of NBCUniversal, E! News, sports, you name it, for some of that content. People’s consumption habits are changing rapidly and it’s not limited to just young people,” Oppenheim said.

NBCU is by no means early to the party here, with CBS Interactive having launched an ad-supported streaming news platform back in November 2014. 

CBS Television Stations and CBS Interactive have launched a new streaming news service, providing content from its two New York area television stations -- CBS 2 and WLNY 10/55.

Called CBSN New York, the service is the first of the network’s planned direct-to-consumer offerings that will stream anchored news coverage and live breaking news events from major markets served by CBS’s owned and operated stations.

CBSN New York is now available through CBSN on CBSNews.com and, beginning tonight (Dec. 13), on the CBS News apps for mobile and connected TV devices. In addition, the service is now available through CBSNewYork.com and the CBS Local mobile app.

CBSN launched in November 2014, and according to the broadcaster has seen its average monthly viewers grow nearly 30% this year. Nearly 80% of CBSN’s viewers are between the ages of 18 and 49 with an average age of 38.

CBS Television Stations and CBS Interactive will continue the rollout of CBSN Local services with the launch of CBS Los Angeles in early 2019, followed by other major markets where CBS owns local television stations.

CBS owns 28 local stations -- 15 CBS affiliates, 8 The CW affiliates and 3 independent stations -- in large markets including New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami, San Francisco and Seattle. The CBSN streaming service will be ad supported and will complement CBS’ other streaming services, CBSN, CBS Sports HQ and ET Live. Ultimately the service will also be included as live channels in the broadcaster’s pioneering streaming offering, CBS All Access, in their respective markets.

“The launch of CBSN New York represents the beginning of an exciting new era for our local media business,” said CBS Television Stations president Peter Dunn in a statement. “We are thrilled to be able to provide our premium local news content on all of the most popular platforms and open the door to multiple revenue streams. CBSN New York and the other streaming local news services launching in 2019 will be a perfect companion to the award-winning national and global news reporting provided by CBSN.”

CBSN New York features live streams of WCBS and WLNY’s regularly scheduled newscasts and additional weekday one-hour newscasts at 7 a.m, 1 p.m. and 7 p.m that will be produced exclusively for CBSN New York. In addition, CBSN New York will provide live continuous coverage of breaking news events and an extensive library of local news content that will be available for on-demand viewing.

“CBSN viewers have told us they want more local content, and we know there will be a tremendous appetite for the high-quality, live-streaming local coverage from our stations around the country,” said EVP and general manager CBS News Digital Christy Tanner in a statement.

Las Vegas -- Speed and agility are hallmarks of any over-the-top video service, but striking a balance between full independence and a collaborative relationship with CBS News have also served as key tenets at CBSN, the digital, 24/7 news service launched in 2014.

CBSN is, at its core, a digital, over-the-top news service that features live feeds and covers breaking news alongside on-demand access to past news stories. In addition to being available as a free, ad-based standalone offering via apps for mobile and TV-connected devices, it is also offered via CBS All Access, CBS’s subscription-based streaming product.

“We’re set up to take advantage of the fact that it’s a digital stream,” Christy Tanner, executive vice president and general manager at CBS News Digital, said here Tuesday in a keynote conversation with Will Richmond, editor and publisher of VideoNuze.

CBSN, which is expanding into Canada, emerged as a dedicated digital property in part because CBS saw a market need for it, but also because CBS did not have a full-time cable news outlet.

“That was freeing in a way to start something new,” Tanner said, noting that CBSN didn’t have to worry about cannibalizing a 24/7 cable news outlet. Launching the service was “a bet we could take that was relatively low risk,” she added.

However, CBSN pays its own way. “We can more than support ourselves in this [digital] space,” Tanner explained.

CBSN operates separately from CBS’s broadcast TV news organization, but, in a collaborative twist, the digital entity will, on occasion, produce elements for the TV side of the house. A guest on CBS This Morning, for example, might appear for two minutes, and then head over to CBSN for a 10-minute segment on the same topic.

“We like to go a little deeper sometimes,” Tanner said, noting that those segments do end up getting some play on the CBS Evening News.

“We do coordinate extensively with all the [CBS] shows,” including 60 Minutes, she said.

“For the most part, what we have is a new model for a news organization,” Tanner said. “It our shop, everyone’s digital…we’re all intertwined. That’s how the future news organization will be structured.”

And that structure will continue to evolve. The CBSN news operation “will be a lot different two years from now,” she predicted.

CBSN’s demo tends to skew younger, with an average age of 38, than CBS News, whose audience is 20 years older, on average.

“We certainly do see cord-cutters tuning in,” Tanner said.

Though the situation can change on the time of the day or the day of the week, about 50% of CBSN streams come way of TV-connected devices like streaming players, smart TVs and gaming consoles, with 20% coming from mobile devices, and 30% from desktops/PCs.

In addition to getting usage on its own apps via those platforms, CBSN is also getting some traction with Xumo and Pluto TV, two ad-based streaming services that aggregate content into digital “channels” via a wide range of sources, including CBSN.

CBSN, so far, has not focused on carriage with virtual MVPDs [multichannel video programing distributors] such as Sling TV and DirecTV Now, but is not necessarily closing the door on that form of distribution. In fact, carriage of CBSN tied into a broader distribution agreement between CBS and fuboTV, an OTT TV service, that was announced last year.

RELATED: CBSN to Launch on CBS All Access, fuboTV

“We’re talking to everybody,” Tanner said.

CBSN, she said, has strived to remain non-partisan with respect to the political landscape.

“We made a conscious choice to be based on fact, not opinion…and knowledge, not debate,” Tanner said.

As for the future, Tanner said CBSN is getting pitched hard to integrate its service with voice-based navigation and search platforms.

“It’s a huge opportunity, as we are both video and audio news service, but it raises a lot of questions about how to choose from results…I think there’s a lot of work that needs to be done in this space.”

CBSN, as a standalone app, will remain a free, ad-supported service (CBS All Access, the paid OTT service, includes CBSN as an added benefit). CBSN is also available to local affiliates to embed the service into their own digital properties.

“We’ll see how it evolves,” Tanner said of the service’s business model, adding that CBSN does think about what kind of content that consumers would pay for. “But right now we’re providing so much value [with] breaking news that you don’t want to put a pay wall in front of that.” 

CBS has officially thrown its hat into the streaming sports ring with the launch Monday of its CBS Sports HQ sports news service.

 The free, ad-supported 24-hour streaming sports news network -- a collaboration between CBS Sports and CBS Interactive -- will offer sports news, highlights and analysis, said service officials. 

RELATED: CBS Launches Free Streaming News Service

The launch also comes several weeks before CBS and Turner Sports team for the annual “March Madness” men’s college basketball tournament.

CBS, which initially announced its plans for a sport-themed OTT service late last year, becomes the latest company to swing for the fences on the streaming sports digital field. Next up at bat will be ESPN, which plans to launch this Spring its ESPN Plus subscription service, which will feature thousands of live sports events along with sports news and highlights.

CBS Sports HQ also jumps into a sports streaming business still seeking to secure its footing with sports fans. A recent study from market research company YouGov and streaming research company Phoenix revealed that while sports fans want more sports available on digital platforms, their experiences thus far have left a lot to be desired.

Nearly three quarters of sports fans expect bad service from a streaming sports feed while watching a game, with 64% of fans expecting buffering, 42% expecting delays, and 32% expecting poor picture quality. 

As a result, more than 63% of sports fans are reluctant to sign-up or re-subscribe to live streaming platforms in 2018 due to technological problems affecting the signal, and 34% would think about cancelling the services giving them issues.

CBS Sports HQ hopes to counter some of those negative perceptions among sports fans beginning today. 

CBS says its over-the-top direct-to-consumers services already have nearly 5 million subscribers, well ahead of expectations.

Speaking on CBS’s earnings call Thursday with analysts, CBS CEO Les Moonves said that subscriber growth for CBS All Access and Showtime’s OTT product are “far beyond where we expected them to be.”

Moonves said CBS expects to exceed its goal of 8 million subscribers by 2020.

He noted that the streaming services generate higher fees than traditional distribution and create a direct relationship with viewers. That relationship yields valuable data, creating advertising that generates higher rates.

The OTT services area also attracting the next generation of viewers, Moonves said. The average age of viewers on CBS All Access is 20 years younger than viewers who watch on broadcast and cable.

Similarly, CBS’s OTT news service, CBSN, has a young audience, with 80% of viewers between the ages of 18 and 49, and an average age of 38.

Related: CBS Studios International, Amazon Prime Work Out Multi-Season Deal for ‘The Good Fight’

CBS will be following the CBSN model with two more products. CBS Sports’s direct-to-consumer service will launch later this month, just before the start of March Madness and The Masters.

In the fall, an entertainment news service based on Entertainment Tonight will launch.

Both new services will be free and ad-supported.

“We’re setting ourselves up for the direct-to-consumer future,” Moonves said.

CBS All Access will also be going international, launching in Canada in June, and then in Australia and Europe.

With its OTT business, Moonves said CBS is actually adding total subscribers and expects to surpass its goal of $2.5 billion in retransmission and reverse comp income by 2020.

"In a nutshell, changing viewer habits are resulting in more subscribers for us and at higher rates,” he said.

CBS All Access allows the network to go deeper into its scripted storylines, said Marc Debevoise, president/COO of CBS Interactive, and create programming that is perhaps more in line with what’s being offered on streaming platforms and cable.

During a keynote at the Next TV Summit, part of NYC Television Week, Debevoise spoke of intensely serialized storytelling on CBS All Access, whose originals include The Good Fight and Star Trek: Discovery.

Read More: Complete Coverage of NYC Television Week

“We’re scratching deeper and deeper into those characters,” he said.

Debevoise was interviewed by Elaine Quijano, a CBSN anchor.

He identified cable networks AMC and FX as being peers in terms of originals. “We have advertising—we’re not all the way to the HBOs and Showtimes of the world,” he said.

CBS All Access and CBSN are helping the network reach a significantly younger audience. All Access’ average viewer is 43, and CBSN’s is 38. “We figured out that millennials want news,” he said. “They just want it in a different way.”

CBS will launch an OTT product dedicated to sports and news. Debevoise didn’t provide specifics, but said the launch is coming soon.

Three quarters of CBSN viewership is live, he said. “A ton of people came live,” said Debevoise, “and that was really key.”

Documentaries on CBSN, he added, give CBS news professionals “a little more breathing room” to tell a timely story.

Read More: Complete Coverage of the Next TV Summit

For CBS All Access, an upcoming launch is the comedy No Activity, from Funny or Die. “Those guys are great comedians,” he said of Will Ferrell and Adam McKay. “They know how to write, how to shoot, how to make things incredibly funny.”

CBS All Access costs $5.99 monthly. The Good Wife spinoff The Good Fight and Star Trek: Discovery, he said, have All Access’ originals strategy off to a strong start, and have driven subscriptions significantly. Of Trek, he said, “The reaction has been incredible. People love it, they hate it, they love to love it, they love to hate it.”

He credited the CBS broadcast network for helping the shows launch. “We happen to own the largest sampling platform,” said Debevoise. “We’re gonna use it when we can.”

CBSN, the CBS streaming news service, will be available on CBS All Access starting Aug. 3. It will begin on subscribers’ desktops and laptops, and will reach other platforms, including mobile devices, in the fall. 

The channel will also launch on streaming service fuboTV as part of fuboTV’s agreement with CBS Corp. to carry CBS and sister channels CBS Sports Network, The CW and Pop. All will be available to stream live through fuboTV’s basic “Fubo Premier” bundle.

“We are pleased with the increasing distribution of CBSN, first as part of fuboTV’s offering and now with availability on CBS All Access,” said Jim Lanzone, CEO, CBS Interactive and chief digital officer, CBS Corp. "The addition of CBSN perfectly complements CBS All Access’ existing offering of live local and national news coverage.”

CBSN launched in November 2014.

Read more at broadcastingcable.com.