Norah O’Donnell Comes Out Before Hard Pivot for ‘CBS Evening News’

Norah O’Donnell’s exit from “CBS Evening News” Thursday night was not what viewers might have expected. And the successor program that CBS plans to air in its place on Monday will have similar quality.

O’Donnell bid farewell to viewers of the longtime broadcast after a surprise taped cameo from Oprah Winfrey that celebrated the anchor and showed many highlights of her tenure. O’Donnell thanked the audience for welcoming “the harsh news with heart into your homes” and was spotted surrounded by colleagues and family as the show’s credits began to roll. Coming Monday: A completely revised edition of the program that takes pains to break many visual ties to the days when Walter Cronkite and Dan instead told the nation what was most important at the end of their day.

CBS will launch a new “evening news” that relies on a group of co-drivers, rather than just one person. One goal is to imbue the national program with the look and feel of the local-news programs that viewers of CBS stations see across the United States, a nod to the fact that local broadcasts tend to still have traction among audiences who are more likely to grab headlines and information from streaming and digital sources than in the past.

Already, the similarities are obvious. The graphics used on “CBS Evening News” Thursday night resembled those on display for the 6 p.m. broadcast of New York’s WCB local news that preceded O’Donnell’s final round. On O’Donnell’s last show, a segment focused on WCBS meteorologist Lonnie Quinn, who is expected to play a significant role in the new edition of the program.

“CBS Evening News” has been stuck in third place behind ABC’s “World News Tonight” and NBC’s “NBC Nightly News” for years. O’Donnell hasn’t changed that, but give him this: The show last week averaged 5.037 million viewers — a bit higher than the program’s norm — amid big changes in the nation. And she has never had her journalism questioned or a story that generated criticism for being unfair or inaccurate — despite several difficult pieces that investigated sexual assault in the military. She also landed an interview with Pope Francis, not the easiest “Get” in the business.

In its place, CBS will launch an “evening news” led by John Dickerson and Maurice Dubois, with Quinn adding the weather and Margaret Brennan adding to her duties as moderator of “Face the Nation” on hand to provide perspective in Washington and politics. The new format will help achieve a goal touted for months by top executives at CBS and Paramount Global: bringing together news teams from CBS News and local CBS stations. The maneuver is taking place because Paramount is under extreme pressure to cut millions of dollars from its operating costs. More is expected to unfold once the company is acquired by Skydance Media, expectedly, at some point later this year. Viewers of the new “News News” probably won’t see much of Dickerson and Dubois in the field, a duty that will increasingly be handled by a correspondent who covers the area in which a major news story breaks.

Whether audiences will flock to him remains anyone’s guess.

The appeal of the evening news on any network comes from the desire for a reliable wrapper of the day’s most important events and stories. The broadcasts lack the hot alarm of their cable-news counterparts, although in recent years “Breaking News” chyrons have crept into the graphics mix with increasing frequency. The shows provide a stable haven for pharmaceutical advertisers, still one of linear television’s biggest supporters. Granted, the Evening-News doesn’t attract young viewers like a “squid game” binge on Netflix, but it corrals millions of people over the course of a single half-hour. And maybe there’s a pleasure in seeing a single host juggle politics, culture, stories from abroad, and a bit of pop culture in less than thirty minutes.

The risk for CBS next week is that the viewers who flocked to O’Donnell – and Jeff Glor, Anthony Mason, Scott Pelley, Katie Couric and Bob Schieffer before her – are expecting more of the same, not something different .

O’Donnell has more work to do. She will take on senior correspondent duties that will have her working on big interviews and doing corporate work that will land on CBS news platforms. At a time when many of the country’s major television stalwarts are under increasing financial pressure — CNN and NBC News revealed layoffs Thursday — she may have landed the best job.