Broadly speaking, the executives described conversations about reducing CBS’s news-gathering capacity while keeping its frontline personalities, like Katie Couric, the CBS Evening News anchor, and paying a fee to CNN to buy the cable network’s news feeds.

Another possibility, these people said, would be for CBS to keep its correspondents in certain regions but pair them with CNN crews.

Presumably, Katie will wave at you from the river bank, and then hustle her famous legs to the next village so she can wave at you again.

Its a long-time practice in manufacturing, with varying degrees of success, but for CBS, this looks a lot like IBM telling Bill Gates, "Sure, why don't you make the operating system for us...", or Yahoo telling Google, "Sure, we'll use your search engine technology..."

The agreement, if its for real, is an attempt to deal with a short-term fiscal problem without addressing the long-term market trends in news.

Why did Rupert Murdoch spend billions to acquire the Wallstreet Journal?

News Corp. is likely to look for ways of bolstering Dow Jones Newswires, a business Mr. Murdoch wants to "aggressively" develop, he said in an interview Tuesday. The unit, which employs more than 850 journalists and publishes business news and data on about 298,000 English-language terminals world-wide, is one of Dow Jones's most profitable.

Whether people want to watch the fading Katie Couric on an archaic nightly news show, or get an video update over a 3G network on their cell phone, the content is where the value is--because its not subject to the vagaries of the delivery mechanism. If CBS really wanted to make money, they would dump Katie Couric and set up a global system of news desks with the money they save.

Hinderaker at Powerline:

That's great: CBS keeps Katie Couric and fires its reporters. There is a huge demand for primary news: raw information, carefully and reliably reported by knowledgeable and objective newspeople. The proliferation of media outlets, including the internet, has increased that demand, not reduced it. It is ironic, and unfortunate, that news organizations are increasingly willing to abandon the function for which they are uniquely qualified, primary news reporting, in favor of news presenting and commentary, fields in which they have no advantage over a host of competitors.

The New Nixon:

Consistently, The Ancien Régime of news media has been a target of the blogosphere for journalistic faux pas, to which the archetypal MSMer retorts: “you guys comment on the news we report on.”

CBS news as a vblog? If the shoe fits...

Ed Driscoll:

In the Jurassic world of the dinosaur media, that definition exquisitely summarizes the proposal by CBS to outsource its news gathering operation to CNN, thus bringing together the news division which brought you the biggest trainwreck moment of 2004 (not to mention 1968!) with the news division that, prior to 2003, brought you long-running coverage of Iraq personally approved by Saddam Hussein and his apparatchiks.

[I've recently been talking to some young readers of UNCoRRELATED who complain of too much inside baseball and cryptic references. To address that, I will attempt to explain or link to material that does: Ancien Régime is French for "old way of doing things..."]