Bari Weiss Urges CBS News to Think Like a ‘Start-Up’

“We are not producing a product enough people want,” Ms. Weiss told employees at her first all-staff meeting at the network.

Bari Weiss, the recently hired and frequently discussed editor in chief of CBS News, began her first networkwide meeting on Tuesday by addressing the obvious.

“There’s been a lot of noise around me taking this job,” she told hundreds of CBS staff members gathered in bureaus across the globe. “I get it. I also get why, in the face of all this tumult, you might feel uncertain or skeptical about me.”

The bumps of Ms. Weiss’s early tenure have been heavily chronicled, including her contentious decision to postpone a “60 Minutes” segment and rocky moments on a revamped “Evening News.”

On Tuesday, it was her turn to lay out her vision: an ambitious transformation of CBS News from a tradition-bound institution into a digitally savvy journalistic engine that meets news consumers where they are — namely, far from broadcast TV.