CBS Storms Into Weather Coverage With Hire of News Veteran Wendy Fisher

Posted by Aldo Pusey on Sunday, September 1, 2024

CBS is forecasting that viewer interest in the ins and outs of national weather is about to gain new wind.

Wendy Fisher, a longtime senior executive at ABC News who ran its newsgathering operations, has been named to lead a newly formed national weather-news operation that will work with both national and local news programs across CBS’ news-and-stations unit.

“This is a significant team effort, as Weather coverage plays a role in virtually every program produced by CBS News and Stations,” said Adrienne Roark, president of content development and integration for the Paramount Global division, in a memo sent to staffers Monday. “This team will work in conjunction with the Stations’ weather teams and storytellers, to serve every newsroom, across every time zone. Ultimately, this will become the CBS Weather Network.”

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Environmental topics are taking on new importance as the global environment changes due to rising temperatures, with effects that have become hard to ignore and weather patterns more erratic. Several media companies have tried to focus their attention on such topics, with The Weather Channel weaving climate change into much of its programming and Fox Corp. launching a 24/7 Fox Weather service across broadband and digital cable. CBS News took some steps in this direction in 2022 when it struck a content alliance with Weather Channel.

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“Weather is consistently among the most urgent and important content we provide local and national audiences. Year after year, studies show it is the biggest driver of audience engagement. From life-impacting to life-threatening weather, audiences turn to us for community connection, context, and clarity,” says Roark. “With extreme weather events becoming worse and more frequent, having best-in-class weather and climate coverage is more important now than ever.”

The move is one of a series aimed at wringing more from the operations of CBS News and the company’s local stations, which were merged under a single operational aegis in 2021. The businesses have been further retrofitted, made part of a division that also includes syndicated programming that was put under the sole oversight of executive Wendy McMahon in the summer of last year. CBS News is, like its competitors ABC News and the operations of NBC News, being managed differently than in decades past, with more emphasis being placed by corporate media owners on new synergies between national news units and the operations of their local stations as the rise of streaming video crimps both types of media business. Disney in February merged its news division and its local stations under a single executive, Debra O’Connell, while NBCUniversal has steadily given Cesar Conde, chairman of its news operations, more say over local stations and its Spanish-language Telemundo division.

Weather has often served as a key element in programming at ABC News, where weather is often one of the first topics broached on the nation’s most-watched newscast, “World News Tonight.” Fisher spent more than three decades at ABC News , which she joined in 1989, initially as a desk assistant. She was among a group of longtime executives who were culled in March of last year as parent company Disney sought to cut costs.

During her tenure there, Fisher became known as an executive key to most major operations. She managed coverage of the war in Ukraine, mass shootings, major weather events, and natural disasters. Fisher has also been critical to ABC News’ coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic; protests following the murder of George Floyd; political campaigns; and terrorist attacks.

Fisher currently serves as a lecturer in advanced reporting at Rutgers University. She graduated from Amherst College.

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