CBSNews.com’s PublicEye blog goes dormant
Cory Bergman January 3rd, 2008
We reported a few weeks ago that PublicEye blogger Matthew Felling was let go by CBSNews.com, and now there’s news the blog is going away. “We weren’t able to find a sustainable business model for Public Eye,” a CBS spokesperson told TVNewser. The blog began in 2005 with the mission of bringing “transparency to the editorial operations of CBS News.” Apparently, there isn’t a business model for a blog about transparency.
9 Comments Add your own
1. Brink | January 4th, 2008 at 6:28 am
This is about making money, which is what corporations do for their shareholders.
As much as you like the idea of an altruistic blog (or, really, ANY blog), if it doesn’t make money, it should get cut.
Just like any other part of a business.
2. Jason | January 4th, 2008 at 7:46 am
Isn’t it hard, Brink, to track whether one part of any news organization makes money? All the parts add up to a whole, which may or may not make money.
I doubt each individual page on CBSNews.com is expected to make money.
3. Anonymous | January 4th, 2008 at 8:51 am
Jason’s birthday is January 3, 2008.
4. Brink | January 4th, 2008 at 8:59 am
But paying someone (esoecially someone with no other responsibilties) to write a blog that doesn’t have a specific sponsorship is tough to justify when the bottom line comes under scrutiny. The blog would have to generate a very large number of hits (and then draw those visitors to other areas of the site) to come close to justifying its existence.
5. Cory | January 4th, 2008 at 9:10 am
Sure, there are business realities behind everything we do, but the mission of this particular blog was really about as far away from pageviews as you can get. It was created in the wake of “Rathergate” to give the newsroom more transparency with the outside world.
So the spokesperson should’ve found a better way to explain this, such as, “we’ve built user feedback into CBSNews.com, top to bottom, so we’ve institutionalized many things PublicEye stands for.” Or something to that effect.
What’s sad about this, is the blog about transparency didn’t even blog about its own demise.
6. Safran | January 4th, 2008 at 11:23 am
I can’t imagine anyone at CBS News thought Public Eye would be a self-sustaining business. Ombudsmen are not the reason people buy newspapers. They are meant to be a conduit to the readers, so that the audience feels it can better trust the news organization.
I thought that was the idea behind Public Eye - that people like the estimable Vaughn Ververs, Matt Felling and their crew would help rebuild CBS News’ image difficulties so that the audience would once again trust their organization. There’s simply no way anyone thought these pages would get millions of views. As Cory points out, the section was done to institute transparency.
7. tdc | January 4th, 2008 at 7:04 pm
with perky whatzerface doing the evening news, do they really have to worry about transparency anymore?
and speaking of lost bloggers- what ever happened to that one LOST REMOTE just brought on… liz foreman???
i miss her.
8. Charles | January 4th, 2008 at 11:24 pm
Launching PublicEye was one of the few things that got CBSNews positive reviews in the past couple of years. Maybe they just don’t know what to do without bad press?
9. Safran | January 5th, 2008 at 7:50 am
@tdc: I stole Foreman to start my soon-to-be launched competitor FoundControl.
Leave a Comment
(Please keep URLs out of the comment body or the spam filter will block you.)Subscribe to the comments via RSS Feed