A channel that needed its own reason to exist

Twenty-four hours is a lot of hours.

I oversaw the January 24, 2022 launch of the 24-hour CBS News Miami streaming channel: staffing models, workflows, original programming and daily editorial execution. The hard part was never the technology. It was answering what a viewer gets at 2 p.m. on a Tuesday that they cannot get from the 6 o’clock news.

I led the January 24, 2022 launch of CBS News Miami’s 24-hour stream: staffing models, continuous-news workflows, original programming and daily editorial execution. Then I conceived Headliners, designed it around the newsroom capacity we already had and took the stream-only weekly review from idea to air in two weeks.

The opportunity

A new 24-hour channel with a schedule to fill and no programming of its own. Repeating the broadcast would have taught the audience there was no reason to come back.

What I built

Staffing models and workflows for continuous streaming coverage, plus Headliners, a stream-only weekly review I conceptualized and launched in two weeks.

What I learned

Streaming-native audiences do not watch a channel; they watch a thing. Give the platform a franchise of its own and the schedule stops being a hole to fill.

Headliners was a weekly review built for people who had missed the week: the stories that actually mattered, the reporters who covered them, and the context a daily newscast never has room for. It ran on the stream only. That was the point.

Two weeks from decision to first episode, with no new headcount, because the format was designed around the capacity the newsroom already had, the same constraint that later shaped The Signal.

Headliners gave the stream an original franchise instead of another broadcast rerun. The format used the newsroom’s existing reporting and talent, then assembled it on a fixed weekly cadence.