San Francisco/New York - In another possible sign of the challenges facing traditional US news media, CBS, the one time leader of television news, is negotiating to have CNN take over some of its news-gathering operations, the New York Times reported Tuesday. CBS denied the report.
"CBS News has no plans to outsource any of its newsgathering operations to CNN," a CBS News spokesperson said. "We are extremely satisfied with and proud of our newsgathering operation. No outside arrangement is being negotiated."
Quoting executives briefed on the issue, the report said that the talks focused on reducing CBS's news-gathering capacity while keeping its frontline personalities, like Katie Couric, the CBS Evening News anchor, and paying a fee to CNN to buy the cable network's news feeds.
Another possibility would be for CBS to keep its correspondents in certain regions but pair them with CNN crews, the story said.
Though a traditional leader of network news, CBS has been mired in last place in recent years, despite paying news star Katie Couric 15 million dollars a year to attract viewers back to its evening news show.
At the same time overall network viewer ratings have plummeted amid the challenge from hundreds of cable TV stations and the internet.
