Bari Weiss, the recently hired and frequently discussed editor in chief of CBS News, began her first networkwide meeting on Tuesday by addressing the obvious.
“There’s been a lot of noise around me taking this job,” she told hundreds of CBS staff members gathered in bureaus across the globe. “I get it. I also get why, in the face of all this tumult, you might feel uncertain or skeptical about me.”
The bumps of Ms. Weiss’s early tenure have been heavily chronicled, including her contentious decision to postpone a “60 Minutes” segment and rocky moments on a revamped “Evening News.”
On Tuesday, it was her turn to lay out her vision: an ambitious transformation of CBS News from a tradition-bound institution into a digitally savvy journalistic engine that meets news consumers where they are — namely, far from broadcast TV.
“We are not producing a product enough people want,” she said, while dismissing day-to-day Nielsen ratings as an outmoded benchmark. “What winning looks like writ large for this company is building incredible journalism for audiences that are so much bigger than the one that we currently have,” she added.
Her rallying cry was intended as a reset of sorts, a chance to cut through the suspicions that Ms. Weiss, a frequent critic of the mainstream news media and founder of the independent site The Free Press, is trying to tilt CBS News into more pro-Trump territory. She urged her journalists to reel in investigative scoops (and “scoops of ideas, scoops of explanation”) and think beyond traditional TV broadcasts, referring to her ideal reporters as “dynamic Swiss Army knives capable of writing, speaking, hosting, reporting, analyzing and writing.”
She also announced a new roster of CBS News contributors with viewpoints spanning the political spectrum. The group includes Andrew Huberman, a neurobiology expert who is a popular influencer in the so-called manosphere; Niall Ferguson, a British American historian who frequently writes for The Free Press; Casey Lewis, a Gen Alpha Substack trend-spotter; and Coleman Hughes, a Free Press contributing writer who has argued for “a colorblind society.”
Running an organization as large and influential as CBS News is the biggest challenge of Ms. Weiss’s career. She was appointed last year by its new owner, the technology heir David Ellison, who acquired the network’s parent company, Paramount, after a contentious sale process. Shortly before the Trump administration approved the deal, Paramount paid $16 million to settle a defamation case against “60 Minutes” brought by President Trump.
In one sense, Ms. Weiss’s remarks on Tuesday echoed those of many media executives trying to steer old-line news institutions, with falling revenue and graying audiences, into the choppy waters of new media.
She framed the future of CBS News in stark terms, warning employees that it would be “one hell of a fight” to keep pace in a rapidly changing business. And she told her team to be more nimble and innovative, calling CBS News “the best-capitalized media start-up in the world.”
Ms. Weiss also warned that employees who did not subscribe to her vision may not wish to remain. “It’s a free country,” Ms. Weiss said. “I completely respect if you decide this is just not the right place at the right time for you.”
Her challenge was underscored by a lengthy question-and-answer session with employees, who asked about her decision in December to postpone a “60 Minutes” segment about a notorious prison in El Salvador where deported Venezuelan migrants were detained.
Ms. Weiss said that she held the segment because she believed it required more reporting, and that the decision was hers alone. “I was not pressured by David Ellison or anyone else,” she said.
She also acknowledged the fallout from her decision to pull the segment after it had been promoted by the network, noting that she was new to broadcasting and unfamiliar with “that specific logistical nightmare.” Referring to the 11th-hour nature of her decision, she said, “Nothing of that kind is ever going to happen again.”
As Tuesday’s event concluded, Gayle King, the “CBS Mornings” anchor, spoke up to offer a rallying cry of sorts.
She thanked Ms. Weiss for presenting “a very good case for what you want this company to be,” adding that it was good for the newsroom “to hear and see that you are a real person and this is what you want and how you feel about us.”
Still, Ms. King was blunt about the public reaction to Ms. Weiss’s tenure so far. “People now come up to me to my face, if I’m at the airport, they go, ‘Love you guys, but I ain’t watching you anymore,’” she said.
Ms. King also criticized employees who were divulging details of the newsroom’s inner workings to the press, and speculated on how long it might take for her own remarks to leak.
Ms. Weiss, wryly, chimed in: “I’m sure someone’s livestreaming it right now, Gayle,” she said, according to a recording of the event obtained by The New York Times.
Michael M. Grynbaum writes about the intersection of media, politics and culture. He has been a media correspondent at The Times since 2016.
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