Wendy Fisher will lead a newly formed national weather-news operation that will work with both national and local news programs across CBS’ news-and-stations unit.
Fisher currently serves as a lecturer in advanced reporting at Rutgers University. Her Rutgers bio said, “Wendy Fisher is a 34-year veteran of ABC News, having served most recently as senior vice president of Newsgathering. She started as a desk assistant and rose to oversee hundreds of reporters and producers while coordinating domestic and foreign news coverage.”
“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.”
“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.