Tony Dokoupil is launching a podcast, and if you happen to watch the video version and look very, very closely, there’s a chance you could spot Salvador Dali’s phone number.
Dokoupil, the anchor of the CBS Evening News, is now almost 11 months into the job, and to hear him explain it, he is just beginning to find his rhythm and footing in the high-profile role. So that makes for an opportune moment to expand the Evening News to digital platforms with a wholly original podcast extension: Great Question with Tony Dokoupil.
It will be available in video form (on YouTube and all the other podcast platforms), shot in his office, alongside audio versions.
“You’re going to get to see my dad’s mugshot on the shelf behind me [he was arrested for smuggling marijuana in 1992], and my great uncle’s pioneering gay advocacy journal that he came out with called Michael’s Thing on the shelf behind me, and all my old Newsweek covers and a bunch of books I like,” Dokoupil says, noting all the paraphernalia, before landing on his favorite: “I rescued a Rolodex from the dump when Newsweek was on the brink of folding.”
And yes, it has Dali’s phone number.
Great Question will be built off of the foundation of the Evening News, but it will also be its own thing. The premise? Twice per week, on Mondays and Wednesdays, Dokoupil will focus on one “great question,” looking to journalists or experts to help answer it.
“When I think of the Evening News, I think of our beat as being the story of America one day at a time, which is why I always have that sign off, ‘that’s another day in America,’ and even though we have this amazing team and these global resources and we put out a jam-packed show, there are still things we couldn’t get to the bottom of, and so every day starts with new questions,” Dokoupil explains. “Over the course of a week, there’ll be things that we didn’t get to or that are lingering, and the hope of the podcast is you’ll be able to distill that into the biggest, most urgent, most pressing, most important, or just most interesting question, and then you try to match that to a guest.”
Watch the trailer:
Among those guests will be author and podcast host Malcolm Gladwell to discuss whether America needs more police and 60 Minutes contributor Gianna Toboni talking about the death penalty. Episodes will focus on why America kids seem so bad at math, if gambling apps are trying to addict us, and other tough or interesting questions.
The show “is an effort to capture that curiosity and have a format where I’m asking a question that is genuinely occurring to me in the moment that I genuinely want to know the answer to, and I don’t know what’s going to happen next,” he says.
But for Dokoupil the show is also a chance to show his voice, and to help a digitally-native audience that might not watch the Evening News understand who he is as a journalist and as a person.
“There are people who watch traditional TV and they love it, they love the product, they grew up with it, they’re still into it, and that’s a great audience,” Dokoupil says. “There’s another group of people who are more online who genuinely believe that people on TV are just getting things fed into their earpiece, and they’re basically robots with hair pieces on. That is a real meaningful part of the population.”
“And I think part of the advantage of a podcast is when you’ve been around as long as I have, and you have stories from the field and the things you’ve learned, giving people an opportunity to hear you talk at length with somebody else who knows a lot, who’s been around, and have a genuine conversation — it just exposes new people to who you are as a journalist,” he continues. “What excites you? What interests you? And it deepens that one-on-one relationship, which is what works on television, and is also I think what works in podcasts.”
Dokoupil hopes that it gives viewers a little slice of who he is outside of those 30 minutes every weekday, and outside of other things he does for CBS, like last week’s town hall with Vice President JD Vance, or next month’s midterm election coverage, which he will co-anchor with Norah O’Donnell.
And it comes as he says he has finally found his footing at the Evening News.
“At the beginning, I felt like Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, I was naively walking into this new neighborhood, and it took me a little while to realize all the ways in which it’s not the morning show,” he recalls, adding that “a lot of people didn’t know my work or who I was.
“Different people are watching, and they have different ideas about what works, and everything I think flows from that.” he adds. “But now, 10 months in, I understand it, I love it.”
A big part of that has been finding his voice in the anchor chair, and refining the stories the show covers.
“I think when we launched, we were pretty heavy on politics. And politics are important, we cover it every night, sometimes with two beats, sometimes with even more, but it’s not everything,” he says. “And I think we’ve found a mix that’s right for us. I also think the sound of the show has changed in a way that’s been great. I write or revise every single word that comes out of my mouth… I think now people can tell when they’re hearing it, it’s really me.”
And now Great Question will, hopefully CBS News thinks, bring that voice to new places, in a digital expansion that is unusual for an evening news anchor.
“I believe in the form. I like podcasts myself, so there’s that,” Dokoupil says. “But also, you know, I’ve been doing the Evening News for 10 months now, almost a year, we’re in a good rhythm with the show, we like the direction of the show, we feel the momentum, and we realize we had the resources and the space to fit a podcast in, and it would give us the opportunity to pursue the longer questions and answers that are often the most exciting part of journalism.”