CBS News on Tuesday announced two key assignments affecting on-air and editorial.
Jim Axelrod was named chief correspondent and executive editor of the Eye on America franchise, which is part of the CBS Evening News with Norah O’Donnell, and Alturo Rhymes was named executive producer of daily news.
Under Axelrod, Eye of America is being expanded and re-imagined as a separate unit within CBS Evening News. This new unit will rely on a core team of reporters and producers to deliver stories on key issues that matter to people nationwide.
In a note to staff, Adam Verdugo, executive producer of CBS Evening News, said, “The goal is for Eye on America stories to air four nights a week with Steve Hartman’s On the Road continuing to air on Fridays. In other words, these stories won’t be just once a week; they will become a staple in our broadcast.
Verdugo added that news segments “will run first on the CBS Evening News and then be featured across all CBS News and Stations programs and platforms.”
Before being named to this position, Axelrod was the chief investigative and senior national correspondent for CBS News. The award-winning correspondent has covered a broad range of domestic and international stories, notably the war in Iraq and the American invasion of Afghanistan.
Axelrod joined CBS News in 1996 as a Miami-based correspondent and has also worked in the Dallas bureau and New York bureaus. He served as CBS News chief White House correspondent from 2006-2009, was named a CBS News national correspondent in 2009 and was the anchor of the Saturday edition of CBS Evening News for four years from 2012-2016.
Meanwhile, Rhymes will oversee daily news and breaking news coverage produced by CBS News and broadcast across all platforms. He will work closely with the newsgathering teams based in CBS News bureaus, stations, Streaming and CBS News show producers to guide the decision-making of the daily editorial story coverage across all CBS News platforms.
In a separate note to staff, Ingrid Ciprián-Matthews, president of CBS News, said Rhymes will “work hand in hand with Terri Stewart and the show eps in coordinating and tracking daily reporting for all programs—while also working directly with correspondents and field teams.”
She added, “With this change, we’re embracing a model where the story drives the coverage to fuel a 24/7 multiplatform news organization. By streamlining the decision-making process around daily news, we’ll be faster and deeper in our reporting from morning to night and ultimately better positioned to own the big stories.”
Rhymes has been at CBS News since 2005. He most recently was the executive story editor for the CBS Evening News. During his time at CBS News, he has produced and led teams covering major domestic, international and breaking news events ranging from the aftermath of Katrina to the unrest in Ferguson and the papal visits to Cuba.
He joined CBS News in 2005 as a producer at Newspath and has worked at NBC, MSNBC, CNBC and CNN.
