I’ve been watching the circus surrounding Scott Pelley and CBS News this week, and it reminded me of something I learned a long time ago.
Sometimes the smartest thing a new editor can do is absolutely nothing.
Not forever. Just long enough to understand what you’re dealing with.
Over the years, I found myself in charge of three different newsrooms. Each one had its own culture, traditions, strengths, weaknesses, and quirks. Each one covered a different community. Each one had reporters who knew things I didn’t.
So whenever I took over, I gave the staff the same speech.
“No major changes for 90 days.”
That wasn’t because I lacked ideas.
It was because I lacked knowledge.
The first 90 days were for learning.
Who was the best reporter in the room?
Who knew City Hall?
Who could walk into a military command and get answers?
Which stories mattered to readers?
What traditions existed for a reason, and which ones survived only because nobody had bothered to question them?
I spent those months listening.
Then I made decisions.
The older I get, the more radical that seems.
Today, too many leaders arrive carrying a blueprint before they’ve even found the coffee machine.
They don’t ask, “What works?”
They ask, “How can I change this place?”
That’s backwards.
A newsroom isn’t a software platform.
It isn’t a startup.
It isn’t a collection of interchangeable parts.
It’s an institution built one source, one story, and one deadline at a time.
That’s why I’ve always respected Scott Pelley.
Whether you agreed with every story he reported is beside the point.
For decades, Pelley practiced a form of journalism that has become increasingly rare: shut up, do the reporting, let the facts speak.
No dancing on social media.
No building a personal brand.
No trying to become the story.
Just reporting.
Imagine that.
A journalist whose primary interest was journalism.
What a concept.
The irony is that the people who built institutions like “60 Minutes” understood something that modern executives often forget.
Trust is accumulated slowly and spent quickly.
You don’t inherit it.
You earn it.
The correspondents who made 60 Minutes famous didn’t receive credibility from a corporate memo.
They earned it story by story.
Interview by interview.
Year after year.
That’s why viewers watched.
Not because of a logo.
Because they trusted the people behind it.
The older I get, the less interested I am in management theories and buzzwords.
I’ve sat through presentations about disruption, transformation, reinvention, synergy, optimization, and every other fashionable term consultants use before sending an invoice.
Most of it is nonsense.
The fundamentals rarely change.
Listen before speaking.
Learn before changing.
Understand before directing.
The first thing a new leader should bring into a newsroom is curiosity.
Not certainty.
Maybe that’s old-fashioned.
Then again, so is honest reporting.
And there seems to be a growing demand for both.