Pain is evident in the voice of the CBS News chairman, Jeff Fager, when he talks about the ratings performance of “The Early Show,” the network’s long-suffering morning news broadcast.
Distant third in the ratings? That’s “a phrase I hate hearing,” Mr. Fager said Tuesday as he announced another revamping of the network’s morning strategy.
Effective Jan. 9, the PBS interviewer Charlie Rose will join the anchor Erica Hill for the 7 a.m. hour, and the talk show host Gayle King will lead the 8 a.m. hour on the broadcast, which will be given a new name and be marketed as a more serious alternative to the popular morning shows on NBC and ABC.
Referring to the success of the CBS network in prime time, Mr. Fager said, “It’s amazing, really, that the No. 1 network in television by far, by far, isn’t doing better” in the mornings.
It has been this way for decades. What’s different this time, Mr. Fager asserted at a news conference on Tuesday, are the people involved, like Mr. Rose, who said he would rely on decades of A-list contacts to book guests, and Ms. King, who said she would ensure that the program be smart and entertaining.
Morning television, Ms. Hill noted, “is very much about who you want to wake up with.”
Chris Licht, the former producer of the MSNBC ensemble “Morning Joe,” will be the executive producer of the program, said David Rhodes, the president of CBS News. Mr. Licht joined CBS in June as the news division’s vice president for programming, and he will retain that role.
Mr. Licht said the program would not imitate its rivals. There will be no cooking segments and no couch on the set. “Where will the weatherman sit? Oh wait,” he said jokingly, since there will be no weatherman. (Local stations are already inserting their own weather segments into the sobered-up “Early Show.”)
Within the television business, there is widespread skepticism about whether a hard news bent will help bring in viewers in the morning.
Mr. Fager, who is also the executive producer of “60 Minutes,” said that while the morning program would emphasize hard news just as that Sunday newsmagazine does, “it’s not going to be all serious.” He said it would cover pop culture as well as political and economic news, describing it as a mixture of what’s important “and sometimes what’s just plain interesting.”
Mr. Rose said he would continue to host his PBS and Bloomberg interview program. But Ms. King will not continue to host her talk show on OWN, the cable channel owned by her best friend, Oprah Winfrey. OWN said Tuesday that Ms. King would “join us from time to time as her schedule allows.”
Mr. Fager would not make predictions about ratings. “It’s been tough in the morning at CBS,” he acknowledged. “A lot of times we replaced people without really re-thinking from the ground up” about the structure of the broadcast.
And this time? After the news conference, he walked with reporters through an old reference library at CBS that is being rebuilt as a newsroom and studio for the newscast. The past, he said, doesn’t matter. “We have an opportunity to start fresh.”
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