The other thing [Vaugh Ververs] will do is he’ll be proactive in explaining how CBS does its business. And by that I mean he’ll go in, and he might decide one day to videotape the story conference for the evening news — at 10:00 in the morning they get together and talk about what’s likely to be on the evening news tonight — and give people a glimpse of how those decisions are made. And show the editors pitching stories, and saying “No, we have that, we should put this here, and let’s spend our time on this,” to give more transparency to how we make our decisions.

SH: You’ve mentioned people having a chance to see the “work product” [of CBS News], which I assume ties into the “Public Eye” blog?

LK: Certainly we’re going to do some of that in the “Public Eye.” But I think just as a matter of Internet storytelling, not just for the “Public Eye,” we’re going to be offering up what used to be considered just work product. There’s no reason if we do a thirty-minute interview with somebody, a video interview, we cut out two minutes of it for a report or thirty seconds for a report, and we quote maybe four or five lines in a printed version. There’s no reason we can’t allow our users to see the whole thirty-minute interview if they want. The kind of restrictions that kept us from doing that before — which was that there wasn’t the bandwidth, so for a half-hour news broadcast you take the high points, you don’t actually run the whole interview, ever. But there’s no reason not to. Unless someone said something libelous, or we have reason to be concerned about it, we can offer the user one level deeper into the news gathering process, and show what used to be just considered work product. We remove our judgment in picking what was important for that interview, and let the readers decide for themselves. And there’s absolutely no reason not to do it.

SH: Staying with the transparency for a minute, the news division took a big hit to their credibility with the mistaken National Guard story, particularly among conservative bloggers. Outside of this “Public Eye” blog, is there anything else you intend to do on the Web site to help restore credibility to CBS News?

LK: Well, credibility is earned by your coverage. CBS News has covered the news for 50 years, and done a great job of it. I don’t think what happened with the National Guard is any different than what happened at the New York Times with Jayson Blair, or the Washington Post when they had the … Janet Cooke scandal — great institutions can still be deceived. And whatever happened — and I wasn’t there then, so I can’t really speak to it — but whatever happened during the MemoGate situation, happened. Did that make the CBS News people more agreeable to do something that gives them more transparency? You’d have to ask them that. I didn’t go to them with this idea because of that.

We came up with this idea because we think news, the concept of how news is delivered, has changed. And news has become a loop. You don’t publish a story anymore and that’s the end of it. Stories get discussed, kicked around and reacted to in real time now — that’s what I mean by a loop. And we have to engage that process if we’re going to be a Web news organization.

If you’re a newspaper, there’s nothing you can do for 24 hours. If a story’s wrong, you gotta wait until you can fix it. On the Web, we’re held to a higher standard. The expectation is that that story on our site, as it is, is correct, or it’s correct to the best of our knowledge. If information has surfaced during the day about a story we posted this morning, the public expects that we’ll update that story. And when they come to our site, it’s real time. So we don’t have an excuse, like “Oh, we only publish once a day,” to have a story not be there correctly.

So this process is also designed to make us acutely aware of criticism or commentary about stories we write, so if there is some debate that’s actually something we should pay attention to, and we need to change the story we have posted, we’re aware of it. Just because a blogger posts something on their site saying we’re wrong about a story, A, doesn’t mean we’re wrong and B, we won’t see that, necessarily, not in any real time — he’s a blogger. If we’re looking out there, though, and if we encourage the blogging community and the general public to use Vaughn as kind of a point person when they think there’s something wrong with one of our stories, or they think there’s new information we should know about, that’s great. And it’ll just get it to us faster, and make us pay more attention to a story we might not have paid attention to because we thought it was done.

SH: In terms of soliciting things from the outside, an article in Broadcasting & Cable says that another part of your plan for the new site is to solicit submissions from the public.