Since grade school, Wendy McMahon knew she wanted to be in local broadcast news. Now president of CBS News and Stations, she’s achieved a path she set for herself early on. But it took getting out of her comfort zone and embracing a challenging digital role to lay the groundwork for her current role — one where she’s embracing streaming alongside linear TV as the next step in her career.
McMahon ran marketing and promotion at local TV stations for 11 years before joining ABC in 2009. In 2015, she got an opportunity to take a broader digital role at the Disney-owned station group. Her response: “Why not?”
“It was a role that required deep curiosity, open-mindedness, vulnerability, and I had to show up with a willingness to learn,” McMahon told TheWrap for this week’s Office With a View. “After being in a business for 15 years at that time where I felt really grounded, where the business had almost become intuitive, there was a ton of discomfort and associated with walking in to a room full of people who all knew more than me about the business that I was now being asked to lead.”
Her experience overseeing digital products and leveraging data to drive audience acquisition and retention paid off more than she could imagine as the news industry began prioritizing streaming.
“It was also driven by the realization that audiences and the businesses that we worked in — and that I loved — were changing at such a pace that a new path forward needed to be charted,” McMahon said. “But to chart that path forward, I felt I needed to understand the what and the how — I wanted a digital MBA of sorts, so that I could be not just someone envisioning the future, but someone who could also execute on that, or at least understood what execution looked like.”
Armed with expertise in developing a digital business, McMahon got promoted to president of the ABC station group in 2018, then joined CBS as president and co-head of CBS News and Television Stations in 2021. Her digital experience, she said, readied her to boost the role of streaming in the business.
“If we are to live our mission of informing and serving our audiences, then we must meet those audiences where they are,” McMahon said. “Streaming, for us, is both an exercise of ensuring our relevance for years to come [and] an exercise in engaging with audiences that are often younger than our linear television audience, even with the same content.”
It’s not only a turbulent news cycle, but also one for news networks as well. What lessons have you learned about how you can best serve your audience during this time?
The need to always stay audience-focused and then team-focused is something that I think about constantly. My job, ultimately, is to develop and then to clearly and consistently articulate a shared vision for the future, and then to hire, train, recruit, promote and empower our team members and our leaders to drive that vision forward.
Whenever the complexities of the news cycle and the challenges of the business threaten to distract, or take me or our team off of those priorities, I always try to bring us back to the center. Why are we here? We’re here to serve our audiences, we’re here to serve one another.
Different locations require different specialties. How have you balanced local and national reporting?
Regardless of whether you’re in Dallas or New York, there’s one holistic vision for the organization. It’s incumbent on the leader to have the patience and the appreciation for the market-to-market, business-to-business necessary differences to allow that vision to be realized in any number of ways.
How have you found success building up your streaming portfolio?
Our local streams leverage the linear newscast, but the opportunity we see is mornings, so we’ve created live newscasts that are just for streaming.
We also know that breaking news and severe weather are moments where our audiences depend on us and they come to us, so we move with the audience on their journey with us from TV to streaming to our sites to back again. On streaming, that means extended coverage. We will stay on for hours, if it is a developing story, in direct reflection of the audience interest. We have that ability to leverage our coverage in that way.
What advice would you give to smaller news networks looking into building out their streaming offerings?
There was once a belief that we need to create a different character of sorts for digital or for streaming than what we have on television, and the reality is: No, audiences want to see the very same journalists they trust on television on digital, on streaming.
Leverage the best in the newsroom and leverage the linear resources that you have to start building in the streaming space.
Set up rigor around experimentation. A lot of time and, dare I say, dollars have been invested in efforts and initiatives that simply haven’t panned out on streaming. But the data is there. If you have strong data, if you have a strong feedback loop, you’ll quickly understand the value of your work from an audience perspective. Continue to embrace that cycle of innovation, that cycle of feedback, to really do things that will land and that will be relevant and important to your viewers.
