Word: stringers
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Anxieties are running highest at CBS, where the sharpest knife is being wielded. Over the past 18 months, some 150 of the CBS News division's 1,400 employees have lost their jobs. In January, Chief Executive Officer Laurence Tisch asked News President Howard Stringer to cut up to $50 million from this year's nearly $300 million budget. Stringer presented a plan to Tisch last week that called for about $30 million in savings. Within two days, he began firing more than 200 staffers, including about 20 of the division's 75 or so full-time correspondents...
...Howard Stringer now must keep the network from losing in a limp. "This is a tough and tragic time for us," says the CBS News president. His tough job is to reverse the trend in soaring budgets, sparked a decade ago at all three networks by the lure of high-tech equipment and ABC News President Roone Arledge's U.S.F.L.-style raids on the competition. Sending the A team to sites of big stories is another hefty item; a weekend in Reykjavik cost each network around $1 million. And in the days of affluence, says a former CBS executive...
...Stringer will eliminate the individual fiefdoms of the Evening News, Morning News, Nightwatch and the weekend news, and toss all staff members into a "net first" news pool. Producers, correspondents and technicians will be assigned to the next breaking story, no matter what its program destination; despite trepidations at Evening News, CBS executives insist the program will have first call on personnel. With this system, Stringer argues, "you can use all your resources at a single time. Everybody can charge when necessary...
...fewer "everybodys," though. As many as 35 of the division's 250 producers have been let go. The Morning News, a producer predicted, will become more like a newsreel, drawing many of its stories from overseas and affiliate bureaus, and will lose at least 20 of its 75 staffers. Stringer, hailed as the savior of CBS News when he took the job last September, wriggles in his role as the terminator. "Right now we're not thinking much about the outcome of the war," he says. "We're mostly thinking of the casualties...
...transmuted in January into a pair of 90-minute broadcasts, one of them produced by the entertainment division and coanchored by Actress Mariette Hartley). Meanwhile, the news division, which has been forced to eliminate 215 jobs in the past 14 months, will have to keep its belt tightened. But Stringer says no more layoffs are planned, and for now at least, he seems to have boosted spirits. When his appointment was announced, staffers were heartened by a rare sight in the beleaguered halls of CBS News: everyone from secretaries to executive producers crowding into Stringer's office for a champagne...