Cathy Seipp, in-between reminiscing about a childhood Brush With Greatness with--even then--The Man, The Myth, The Legend, Tom Snyder, has some thoughts on the future of television news, or as she calls it, "New Anchor. Same Titanic":

CBS has long been known as the geriatric network, and I sometimes wonder why they don’t just embrace that demographic instead of trying to fight it. Older viewers, being older, have more money to spend on whatever advertisers might care to sell them. So I sometimes wonder about all this chasing after that elusive (and poorer) youth demographic.

One strange, counterintuitive fact about TV is that even though younger viewers have less to spend, they’re willing to spend what they have. Maybe not on mini-vans - but certainly on fast food, beer, acne treatments, cheap clothes and whatever idiotic new movie (“Accepted,” “Snakes On a Plane” etc.) the test marketers have dreamed up.

Viewers 50 and older, the thinking goes, are going to stay in and watch TV anyway. “They also read, listen to the radio, watch CNN,” TV writer-producer Rob Long once told me. “Older people tend to be interested in the world around them. Young people spend most of their time listening to music and masturbating.” In other words, they’re hard to reach and easy to alienate.