Latest version of the ‘CBS Evening News’ gets off to bumpy start with nods to its past

The latest iteration of the “CBS Evening News” built on its previously announced “classic” logo update to incorporate additional elements from its history.

The broadcast, which officially relaunched Monday, Jan. 5, 2025, but had a soft launch of sorts Jan. 3, 2025, due to breaking news out of Venezuela, moved former “CBS Mornings” co-anchor Tony Dokoupil into the anchor chair.

CBS opted to reschedule its “Live from America” road trip for Dokoupil’s debut, instead broadcasting the Jan. 5 edition from Studio 47 at the CBS Broadcast Center.

Motion Graphics

CBS Evening News with Tony Dokoupil

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Instead of using the large LED volume installed in the space about a year ago for the newscast’s previous iteration with John Dickerson and Maurice DuBois, the network opted to flip the cameras around to use the space’s working newsroom as the primary background.

CBS dug up an old anchor desk that had been used at the network’s Washington, D.C., bureau, complete with a disused CBS News logo set in the classic Didot typeface. The desk includes a somewhat dated wood front, with a similar shade used on the LED ribbon that wraps the newsroom as well.

Reports indicate that CBS News, which has seen significant management shifts in recent months after the Paramount-Skydance merger went through, are using a “move fast and break things” approach to re-craft “Evening.” 

Dokoupil’s move to the anchor desk — though long rumored — was not officially announced until mid-December 2025, meaning the network also had only a few weeks to revamp the show’s look and sound. 

While it’s not clear what the network might do going forward, especially if things remain fluid as reports suggest, sources have indicated that changes to the design and packaging are likely to come.

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It’s possible the “Live From America” road trip was intended to give staffers time to create new virtual set extensions or more finely tuned graphics; however, Dokoupil noted that the newsroom view was the “new set” in social media clips. 

Theme music

The broadcast also dipped into its vault and brought back the 1991 theme first used during Dan Rather’s tenure as anchor. Created by Patterson, Walz and Fox Music Productions, this version contains the CBS News Trivers-Myers signature but is otherwise significantly different, with the goal of a “bigger-than-life sound.”

The network also opted to bring back the headline bed from the same package, which sounds more urgent and has a fast-paced cadence. 

As previously reported, “Evening” also switched to using Didot in its primary logo, though the TT Norms CBS logo remained alongside the updated title.

Graphics

One area where CBS didn’t dig deeply into the past, however, was the graphics package. It borrows elements from at least two distinct sources — the show’s previous design and the look used on the CBS News 24/7 streamer and owned stations.

While CBS dropped the gold tones from the elegant design that debuted in January 2025, it did keep the simple gradient look used on top of the headline teases, albeit with tweaks to the layout, typography and logo. Gone is the more modern serif, with Franklin Gothic stepping in as the primary typeface for insert graphics.

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The brighter shades of blue were largely dropped, with gray and white also used in both the open and throughout the rest of the package.

Open graphics

The open itself leans heavily on a mix of beveled shapes, including select parts of the show and the network logo, depicted with concave surfaces facing the viewer.

Because of the angle of the light and the prominent serifs and varying thickness of strokes in Didot, the effect appears, at first glance, to have been applied inconsistently, though reviewing the design more closely does suggest the effect was correctly applied. This is likely why the various “E”s in the design each have slightly different shadows, due to their relative positions to the scene’s light source. 

The shadowing appears to be an attempt to incorporate letters, which are often rendered as flat surfaces, while also incorporating the package’s circular motif, ultimately tracing its roots back to many of the network’s other graphics.

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The open also contains imagery of Dokoupil set amid letters and circular elements, which provide a closer view of the concave 3D effect.

Lower thirds and inserts

The broadcast’s lower third insert banners, meanwhile, follow a similar layout and look as what’s used on the CBS News 24/7 streamer and on the owned stations, including the practice of showcasing the show logo in a wide rectangular box in the lower left of the screen, an approach that was used on “Evening” from 2022 to early 2025.

One difference, however, is that the space provided for headlines and identifiers is offset from the blue box housing the show logo, creating a narrow strip of the lighter rectangle below the bug.

Most previous interactions kept the bug and banners aligned, except for a flag tier that could be added above the logo box.

There is also a solid-color, shadow-like effect behind each of the two boxes in the L3, a choice that feels rushed and has little visual similarity to the dithered shadows found in the open.

As mentioned, Franklin Gothic is used for text within the off-white banners for both headlines and identifiers. Simple horizontal sliding animations can be used to transition between a story headline and on-screen names, the latter of which becomes two tiers. 

The text in story banners feels tight, and in some cases the space between letters becomes almost non-existent, creating a legibility issue.

Combined, the lower third, bug box and animation in the banner also feel less refined than one might expect from a network-level graphics package, but that will likely improve in the coming weeks.

Fullscreens 

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The broadcast also introduced some fullscreen graphics with Didot headers and Franklin Gothic body text. These feel a bit more like the simple, elegant look that “Evening” just dumped, but here again, feel a bit unrefined. 

For the handful that ran Jan. 5, some designs did not appear to consider that a banner might be inserted over it. There were also some inconsistent spacing issues, including a stock market graphic that used the circular shadow for the key datapoints with the word “Dow,” in all caps, seemingly dropped in above and oddly indented.

Some of these graphics were updated for the later feeds provided to affiliates in the western U.S.

OTS graphics

OTS graphics used a similar template as the previous look, with updates made to the typography, colors and backgrounds, including the addition of a world map in the lower right.

The previous graphic’s package OTS is shown here, taken from Saturday, Jan. 3, 2025, when Tony Dokoupil was brought in to anchor due to breaking news. “Evening” did not heavily use boxed OTSs in its previous life, instead preferring to showcase topical graphics behind anchors within the virtual set extensions.

At several points during the Jan. 5 edition, there were some rather ungraceful and poorly timed camera moves to adjust for the OTS box after jumping from a centered shot for split-screen tosses back to the studio to another story intro.

Studio 47 and the ‘Evening News Hub’

As mentioned, Dokoupil anchored from Studio 47, which had been the longtime home of the broadcast going back to Rather’s days. Since leaving the space in 2001, CBS performed multiple renovations to the space, including one as recently as 2025, to update it into what it dubbed the “CBS News Hub” with a flashcam-style camera position available.

In 2025, the LED volume was set up opposite the newsroom workspaces and became home to “Evening” until the end of 2025, moving the broadcast back into its longtime space, which also became known as the “Evening News Hub.”

Much of the scenery seen behind Dokoupil follows a layout that was first developed for Rather in the 1990s. This set, designed by Broadcast Design International, laid the groundwork for the current layout of the curved header and wraparound mezzanine that remains to this day.

In addition to feeding a wood pattern to the LED ribbon and the show’s new logo to the curved header in the center of the arc, CBS also leveraged some of the vertical LED arrays set up within the work areas to showcase more brand imagery, which appeared prominently behind in-studio guests on Jan. 5.

Dokoupil’s one-shot was framed with a Walter Cronkite-era map camera left and a large white board that appeared to be serving as a two-month calendar on the right. Additional background elements included a collection of surfaces in mid-tone woods with an orange-ish cast, along with lighter blues, both of which are similar to those appearing elsewhere on the network and its owned stations.

An early debut

Due to the breaking news from Venezuela, Dokoupil ended up debuting as anchor two days early — anchoring a special Saturday edition of the “CBS Evening News” Jan. 3, 2026.

This edition, however, used the old graphics and open, though the announce was updated to add a reference to it being a “special edition” while also adding Dokoupil’s name, which did not appear within the on-screen graphics (former anchors Dickerson and DuBois’ names did not appear on the title graphic during that period).

Dokoupil anchored the Jan. 3 broadcast from San Francisco using a simplified studio setup with the camera largely locked down and imagery from the old “Evening” VSEs behind him. It was not clear why Dokoupil was in California, though the network’s original planned tour had him anchoring from the city Jan. 9, 2026, though he may have been in town to complete advance work ahead of that broadcast.