Bari Weiss & The Critical Opening Leadership Message
You get one chance to make a first impression
Controversial commentator and commercially viable blogger Bari Weiss is the newly-installed ‘Editor-in-Chief’ of the entirety of CBS News, and opened her email account with an all-hands blast to the entire news staff welcoming herself to the company on Monday morning.
Her arrival had been telegraphed for a long time, and Weiss joins CBS having very publicly cashed an enormous paycheck, with CBS parent company Paramount buying her Substack email newletter business The Free Press for $150million, and throwing in the newly created top editor post as a cherry on top. So her opening gambit to the newsroom was, potentially a delicate game, or at least would be if she was attempting to demonstrate care for the enormous team she’d be helming from this email forth.
After hitting send, it would land in the inboxes of more than 1,000 editorial staffers, almost all of whom think they should be paid more, all of whom believe they’re working their tails off to divine truth from the mayhem, for an ungrateful, hostile public who increasingly believe that mainstream media are in fact a bunch of worthless liars. CBS has had a rough time of late, paying out $16M to President Trump in a move seen as weaksauce by anyone who cares about journalistic backbone. Paramount is owned by son-of-Larry, David Ellison, and the rank-and-file of America’s most middle-of-the-road news network are smarting from a leadership swinging notably to the right in many ways.
As a newly-minted multimillionaire overlord with no hard news experience whatsoever, saying ‘Hello World’ to a tired crew of cynical hacks doing their damndest to keep the lights on, this was a hard email to get right.
WIN THE AUDIENCE
To win hearts & minds, and set Weiss up for success as a leader, the email would have to tacitly and humbly acknowledge all of the above, and the challenges and stresses faced by this team. It could clarify where in the tower of power she would sit, functionally, given that there had never been an Editor-in-Chief before in CBS News history. Is she above an EVP? Would she report to the President of News or vice versa? Do the Exec Producers report to her or retain autonomy for their shows? (Per the AP, Weiss will report directly to Ellison and ‘partner’ with the current CBS News President Tom Cibrowski, whatever that means).
It would have to put minds at ease that despite her lack of broadcast nous, Weiss would listen and learn and lean in aggressively where her experience could help push evolution forward. It could choose to demonstrate a clear understanding of the pre-existing principles that underpinned this storied institutions, and which attract many of the team to that place rather than flashier, more modern outlets. Hard work, diligence, committment to truth. The kind of things you literally FEEL as you walk in the door of the CBS News broadcast center on West 57th St. The lobby is a shrine to these values.
OR, it could say very little. There is, after all, no compulsion to lay all the cards out on day one. Saying too much, or anything at all, can lay a trap for oneself or become something you have to revisit, retract, reframe or otherwise apologise for.
Nope, neither of those would be the plan. Rather, Weiss laid out a preachy ten-point lecture-by-email to the CBS News team exhorting them to do all the things they were already doing. Here it is, below, accompanied by a staffer response. It said too much, and very little, all at once.
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WHO ARE THE AUDIENCE, EXACTLY?
As a leader you’re always writing to multiple audiences. The assumption is that you craft any message for the primary audience, then sense-check that it’s not going to hurl a grenade at any of the other audiences by accident. A skilled leader might manage to hit key points with each audience simultaneously. This didn’t happen here.
The primary audience was that editorial/newsroom audience, with secondary audiences for Weiss being Paramount leadership, and assuming an immediate leak, shareholders and the media.
It’s not hard to sense-check your message for these audiences. Most large orgs have their head of corporate comms that leaders will lean on to guide them and CBS News certainly has a legion of them. But now you also have the helping hand of an LLM, should you wish to draft them in for virtual assistance – ‘all the tools of the digital era’, as Weiss says in her email.
A well-crafted prompt with ChatGPT or Claude, asking it to act as a strategic comms expert and assessing your draft against how those audiences yields a helpful response in a few seconds. This isn’t about outsourcing your voice to technology, it’s about augmenting it, leaning on technology to de-risk your efforts or help you limit the damage they do.
The irony is that she may well have dashed the entire thing off using ChatGPT, per Mother Jones editor Ian Gordon, who crafted a near-identical note in seconds.
For the sake of science here, I used Claude as my head of corporate comms to see how it would likely land. Here’s my ask of Claude, prompting it to sense-check Weiss’s message for the intended audiences. Result? Claude reckons Weiss’s message is a car crash.
“The memo fundamentally misreads the room. Your team doesn’t need a manifesto about basic journalism principles—they’ve been practicing them for decades. The list reads as either patronizing or defensive, and it raises more questions than it answers.
The ten-point list is a disaster.
Points 1-5 and 10 are table stakes—telling CBS journalists to be “factual” and “report the world as it is” is like telling surgeons to wash their hands
The list suggests you think they haven’t been doing these things, or worse, that you need to teach them
It will leak immediately and be interpreted as: ‘Newsletter founder lectures Murrow’s descendants on journalism basics’.”
Claude correctly identifies that it’s not written for the primary audience, rather the secondary (arguably tertiary) audience, the outside media, which is still where Weiss sees herself. Claude continues: “The newsroom will see through it immediately, and once they've lost confidence, the leak will be devastating.”
I disagree here, because the reality is that the newsroom saw through this email before it was ever written and Weiss’ fate at CBS is largely pre-determined, so her best move was probably to say as little as possible in her opener. The fact that she hadn’t already spent time glad-handing Exec Producers and other senior newsroom leaders before sending this email is an even greater fail. They will now be implicated in cleaning it up and re-explaining her intentions.
What’s baffling is that as someone who left the NYT and successfully built a business by creating exactly what the audience wanted & needed from her, Weiss studiously failed to think about her audience right at the start here at CBS News. Perhaps it can be chalked down to excitement or the acquisition hangover or the temporary concussion of a dog that finally catches a car, but you only get one chance to make a first impression, so you best show up sober on day one.
