CBS Correspondent Mo Rocca: ‘Sunday Morning has this dedicated and very active viewership’

By Merrill Knox 

Mo Rocca is the subject of Mediabistro’s latest “So What Do You Do?” interview. Rocca is a correspondent for “CBS Sunday Morning” — his most recent report was on the birther controversy surrounding the 21st President, Chester Alan Arthur — and a host on the Cooking Channel. He shares his thoughts on everything from using Twitter to find stories to picking the topics of his “Sunday Morning” reports:

I’m my own personal Nielsen ratings survey. If I walk down the street, what people respond to me is very telling. The day after my first Sunday Morning piece six years ago, a couple of people walked up to me and told me they loved it. And I realized that I had done The Tonight Show for years, and it was fun doing reports for them. But people watch a program like The Tonight Show very passively. No one would ever say anything about them.

But Sunday Morning has this dedicated and very active viewership. The executive producer, Rand Morrison, is rightly revered in the news business and he’s given me a lot of latitude. My job is basically like going back to college and taking only electives. It’s what I always wanted to do. So I can go from Columbus Day, to the Electoral College, to men who dye their hair, to the birther controversy over President Chester Alan Arthur.

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