NEW YORK — Sometimes a makeover can be too extreme.
Faced with moribund viewership of its flagship newscast, CBS News is trying to stanch audience attrition by recasting the "CBS Evening News with Katie Couric" in a more traditional mold and tapping a veteran news producer to run the program.
Thursday's hiring of Rick Kaplan, a onetime president of cable news channels CNN and MSNBC, amounts to the first public admission that network officials are dissatisfied with the performance of the newscast that had embraced new features aimed at wooing younger viewers. Six months after Couric's much-hyped arrival in the anchor chair, the broadcast has languished in third place, while ABC's Charles Gibson -- known for his matter-of-fact, old-school style -- has expanded his lead over CBS by an average of more than a million viewers a night.
The management shake-up coincides with a retreat from the kind of experimenting that characterized the CBS newscast last fall, when producers condensed news stories in order to air long newsmaker interviews and added segments such as "Free Speech," a platform for viewpoints from around the country. Many of those features have either been abandoned or are being used less frequently.
CBS executives now admit that they miscalculated the willingness of viewers to embrace a new approach to the evening news.
"I think it probably has to remain in a basic traditional mode," CBS News President Sean McManus said. "I don't think we're looking to experiment with new ideas."
On Thursday, McManus announced he was replacing Executive Producer Rome Hartman with Kaplan, a sobering acknowledgment of the challenges CBS has faced in remaking the broadcast for a new generation of viewers.
While the newscast has been able to marginally increase its viewership among young women, it has shed old viewers, who make up the bulk of the audience. So far this season, "CBS Evening News" has averaged slightly less than 7.6 million viewers, down 2% from last year, when Bob Schieffer anchored the program.
The mood at the network is substantially more subdued than it was last April, when CBS Corp. Chief Executive Leslie Moonves called Couric's arrival a game-changing move.
Now CBS hopes that Kaplan, a longtime producer who has done tours at nearly every television network, can recharge the program with an old-fashioned hard-news approach and bolster the standing of Couric, the news division's most costly investment.
