If you’ve been following the news NEWS this week — you may have heard something about Charlie Gibson retiring and Diane Sawyer taking over for him on the news program, ABC’s World News. In some ways there’s been a refreshing lack of gestation over this job announcement and I don’t intend to cause any more blotation. However, I do think there’s a component missing here that needs to be addressed.

Lets see what we’ve got so far on the check list:

1. Woman – is she the first woman to host the news? No — check, moving on.
2. Scandal – is there some sort of scandal we can sniff out of this, obvious or made up? We’re trying — but so far nada. Ok.

End of story — right? Well…not so fast. There is an incredible opportunity here. In most job announcements — in the real world, they don’t so much time on the political components of an appointment, they speak about the person and what they bring to the job.

To keep things brief. Diane Sawyer is special and she’s done some special things before. But to sum up in two words what she’s done all the way through — she TRIES. Sometimes she makes history for the books or for the blogs, other times you may never here about it at all — in every single case she tries and tries again and then after that, she tries some more.

What does this mean, especially when the OBITS for the evening news shows have long been written? Well, the ink is dry, but yet, these shows still keep being produced every single day. These networks, while leaking audience, still control the largest chucks of the largest group of audience left. They also still have the largest budget and amount of resource to bring to originating news — albiet less and less each quarter.

Schmooru sees opportunity in these ‘problems’ all across the ‘legacy medias’ since we don’t do things the way they’ve always done them and we generally lead happy, healthy, productive, but more than anything creative lives. And so we congratulate Diane Sawyer in this new job. One things for sure, trying never hurt anyone that’s any good at what they do — in fact, trying is the only way you can ever do anything with Potential…and Potential for anything is all we ever have.

DPB-West Village, NYC 09.05.09