Outsourcing Foreign Coverage

While we're talking about shrinking foreign bureaus and a smaller pool of correspondents covering world affairs, CBS News is discussing outsourcing some of its coverage to CNN. The NY Times writes:

Broadly speaking, the executives described conversations about 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, these people said, would be for CBS to keep its correspondents in certain regions but pair them with CNN crews.

But, these people cautioned, no deal was imminent.

There's a lot to be said for collaborative effort. Pooling resources can improve efficiency and give journalists opportunities to learn new ideas from each other. The flip side: reinforced groupthink among the press corps.

Posted at 03:56 AM