In the Room: Norah O’Donnell’s Next Move

Welcome back, I'm Dylan Byers. You're reading In The Room, my biweekly private email on the intrigue and inside story behind what’s going on in the media industry.
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Welcome back, I'm Dylan Byers.

You're reading In The Room, my biweekly private email on the intrigue and inside story behind what’s going on in the media industry.

In today’s column, what I’m hearing about the denouement of the Neeraj Khemlani-Norah O’Donnell proxy war, O’Donnell’s next move, and the new future of The CBS Evening News.

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Norah O’Donnell Makes Her Next Career Move

After plenty of rumors to the contrary, Norah O’Donnell is staying home, and set up to finally become the Peter Jennings of CBS—the star that the news division is built around, which in 2022, naturally, means some streaming stuff, too. So is it all water under the bridge with Neeraj?

DYLAN BYERS

Anyone who follows the sordid, off-camera drama of television news would be justified in thinking that Norah O’Donnell was not long for CBS News. O’Donnell, of course, had taken over the historic Evening News telecast, in part, because of a Susan Zirinsky-era deck chair rearrangement that attempted to reset the chemistry on This Morning, which sort of only had room for Gayle King’s ego, and revamp the nightly newscast, which had been rudderless in the Scott Pelley and Jeff Glor eras.

The move seemed clever, and certainly worth the flier. And O’Donnell, a respected newscaster, was given the room she needed. Evening News relocated to Washington, positioning the perennial third-place program as a little more serious and ponderous than its peers. Chris Licht, the new CNN president, had indeed crafted a similar playbook back in the day when he turned around This Morning.

But the O’Donnell era at Evening News was beset by management change (Zirinksy, it turned out, was not long for the C-suite) and endless industry gossip...

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