Comments on: CBSNews.com’s PublicEye blog goes dormant

By: Safran

Safran — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 14:50:11 +0000

@tdc: I stole Foreman to start my soon-to-be launched competitor FoundControl.

By: Charles

Charles — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 06:24:25 +0000

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?

By: tdc

tdc — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 02:04:15 +0000

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.

By: Safran

Safran — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 18:23:16 +0000

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.

By: Cory

Cory — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 16:10:51 +0000

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.

By: Brink

Brink — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 15:59:57 +0000

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.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 15:51:00 +0000

Jason’s birthday is January 3, 2008.

By: Jason

Jason — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 14:46:52 +0000

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.

By: Brink

Brink — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 13:28:23 +0000

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.