The NYT talks to some TV visionaries and asks them what CBS can do to revive its 'CBS Evening News' franchise.

They are Lizz Winstead (The Daily Show), Mark Burnett (reality TV heavyweight), Don Hewitt (creator of 60 Minutes) and Al Primo (considered the founder of the modern local newscast).

Some excerpts:

Winstead:

The big complaint from everybody trying to get information these days is: Who is the media? What are they trying to tell me? Who's actually a journalist? Who's actually a spin doctor? Who's a liar?

The show would be helmed by someone who throws questions each night to a panel of experts that is always changing, depending on the issue. This has got to be a nonpartisan version of looking at the media.

The name of the show? It's the logo of CBS - it's "Eye" CBS. So it's a double entendre if you say it out loud, like "I CBS on ... ." It's graphics-intensive. I think the eye kind of hangs over the panel. It would be cool if, while the person is talking, the eyeball is rolling skeptically.

Hewitt:

Each Friday, I would offer a minute and a half of commentary from a different editor or columnist - preferably a woman - from a college newspaper. It would have to be someone who had something to say, and just as importantly, had the look, the voice and the smarts to say it well. Only the networks haven't realized that women have come into their own in broadcasting. They are making a terrible, terrible error, in an age when the biggest name in television the last five years has been a woman - Oprah Winfrey.

Burnett

I think there has been a lack of honesty in a lot of the news broadcasts on all of the networks. I knew for a fact, because I spoke to a bunch of people in news, that they were scared to go out of the green zone in Baghdad, and in fact were doing less reporting from the outside than they would like, because of genuine danger.

But if you don't go out, you know what would be a great thing to hear on the news? A correspondent saying to the American public, "I've got to be honest with you: it's too dangerous to go out and give you the facts. " I just think that sort of stuff speaks to a level of conversational honesty - a level of not being a dictator of the news.

Primo

The new newscast has to emphasize enterprise reporting. I don't mean investigative reporting; I don't mean four-month old studies on crime. I'm talking about stories that nobody else has, or that are highly interesting. For example, I would have a business unit that has only one job: to pore over reports from companies. You can say, "Company XYZ filed its 1090 form today and guess what: Joe Shmo, the CEO, made $75 million." Then you go out and get him. Chase him down the hall. I call this little thing "the High-Interest Business Report," instead of those Dow Jones averages that are on the air every single day.

You've got to have fun with these things. One of the things we learned doing research for the teen program is that young people like to laugh. They like to laugh at their elders, to see examples of waste, to see examples of who is getting away with what. This should have a sort of edginess. You've got to find a way to do that on the network level, not just the local level.

Primo also said to forget being a newscast of record, to have a strong, interactive Internet component and to simulcast the newscast on national radio.