Alas, poor Norah, I barely knew ye.

Norah O'Donnell reads several newspapers a day to prepare for work.

I received several messages of condolence this week regarding someone that did not die.

The messages came mostly from my friends and current and former contemporaries in local journalism circles, who assumed (tongue in cheek, of course) that I would be distraught over the announcement that CBS Evening News anchor Norah O'Donnell would be leaving her post behind the anchor desk after the presidential election and assuming a new role at CBS News as a senior correspondent.

As an aside, I have to chuckle at the reference of "senior" in regard to Ms. O'Donnell, who is only 50. But then I remember that in the last decade of my employment at The Sun Chronicle, my job title was actually "senior sports writer" with the rank of an editor, even though I had just entered my 50s as well. Besides, 50 is when you become eligible for your AARP card, so I guess it's appropriate.

Anyway, many of my friends are fully aware, and probably amused, by the fact that I have had a longstanding "crush" on Ms. O'Donnell (to whom I will respectfully refer for the remainder of this missive by her first name to cut down on the number of keystrokes). I'd like to think of it more as a reflection of my admiration for her professional accomplishments, and less as a creepy obsession with a famous woman, but I can't control how others will perceive it. After all, my computers do feature the photo appearing at the top of this post (I believe it was taken for a magazine feature story) as the wallpaper screen.

I will admit, she's easy to look at. I'd be lying to you if I tried to deny that. It was probably helpful to some extent in her professional career arc, which rose over a 28-year span from roles as chief Washington correspondent for MSNBC, White House correspondent for NBC and then CBS, co-anchor of CBS This Morning, and finally the anchor and managing editor for the most highly regarded of the three original networks' evening news telecast, the CBS Evening News. TV, as they say, is a visual medium. I, on the other hand, have always had a face for radio.

But the fact is that her résumé describes a rise to the top that is based upon a high level of professional accomplishment, and should definitely be held up as a shining example to young women entering the news business. Unlike the recipe for success at the so-called "most watched" news network in the country, Fox News, Norah advanced through the television news ranks without dying her hair blonde, pushing her chest out of her blouses and exposing every inch of her legs. She did it by being a damned good journalist, and that's why she worked at legitimate and respected media outlets and made it to the top of the mountain. She is, and pardon the archaic gender reference, an old-fashioned newsman.

Unfortunately, the role of anchor for the CBS Evening News just doesn't mean what it once did in the eyes of the viewing public.

I started watching TV when the 6:30 p.m. national newscasts lasted only 15 minutes. Not long after, there were only two legitimate choices if you wanted to be informed -- the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite and the Huntley-Brinkley Report on NBC, anchored by veteran newsmen Chet Huntley out of New York and David Brinkley in Washington.

Walter Cronkite

The kingpin, of course, was Cronkite -- the veteran radio newsman that cut his teeth reporting from London in the 1940s alongside Edward R. Murrow during the horrific aerial bombing campaign by Nazi Germany. Cronkite succeeded Douglas Edwards in 1962 as the anchor of the evening TV news and became over his 19-year tenure in the job "the most trusted man in America."

Cronkite was not only trusted, he also was influential. He did a series of reports about the Vietnam War following the Tet Offensive in early 1968, and concluded his findings with an editorial revealing that military leaders believed the war could not be won. Once that hit the airwaves, Americans by the millions turned against the conflict -- leading then-President Lyndon B. Johnson to supposedly remark, "If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost Middle America."

By the time I entered print journalism, all three networks had traditional nightly news telecasts. But eventually, new technology would create new opportunities. CNN (Cable News Network) was founded in 1980 by Atlanta-based billionaire Ted Turner as a 24-hour news network, a service he believed the three legacy networks could not provide. Australian news magnate Rupert Murdoch countered with Fox News in 1996, giving voice to conservative pundits whose job it was to attack the supposed liberal slant of CNN and the mainstream print and broadcast media. NBC teamed up with Microsoft founder Bill Gates to create MSNBC not long after, giving a legacy network a prominent place in the growing cable market. And over the many years that followed, plenty of imitators have risen and fallen in a news market that now includes direct satellite access and streaming from anyone with a camera and a microphone.

As a result, many Americans today get their news whenever, wherever and however they want it -- always available and with whatever slant is preferred. It doesn't have to be accurate, fact-based or agenda-free. If you're stupid enough to believe anything Jesse Watters, Sean Hannity or Alex Jones says as "news," nothing I can say or do will convince you that you're being sadly misinformed.

Which brings me back to the topic of Norah O'Donnell.

I was first introduced to her on my treadmill.

No joke -- and by "introduced," I mean seeing her on TV for the first time. Sadly, I've never met her in person.

When I lived in North Attleboro, I had a treadmill set up in front of a television set in my apartment. I would run (very slowly) on it at the same time almost every day, and watch news programming while trying to ignore the pain in my knees. Back then, there was a program on MSNBC called "Watch It!" hosted by Laura Ingraham -- long before she became a shrieking, smarmy shill for the MAGA movement on Fox News, of course. It was a fairly concise, and only slightly conservative, presentation of the day's events that included check-ins with NBC News correspondents when the news of the day warranted them. Norah was a frequent contributor to the program as NBC's Washington correspondent, and her reports were always superior to just about anything else on the program.

Fast forward ahead to 2012, when I had grown tired of the overly chatty Today show on NBC and wanted something with a little more of a harder news edge as I started my day. At the same time, CBS revamped its morning show (renaming it CBS This Morning) and created a three-person anchor team led by master interviewer Charlie Rose and former local news anchor and Oprah Winfrey confidant Gayle King. Norah became the third anchor after tweaking to the show replaced original co-anchor Erica Hill, bringing along her street cred as CBS White House correspondent to the hard-news role among the troika.

Norah interviewed "Billions" star
Maggie Siff on CBS This Morning.

I loved the show. Rose, as he did on his long-running PBS program, conducted probing and insightful interviews of newsmakers and celebrities. King provided the pop-culture fluff expertise (as well as her Oprah connection). And Norah was there to be the hard-news interviewer when controversial guests from the political world tried to stonewall the panel.

It was a worthy experiment, and it made some ratings gains against the competition of NBC's Today and ABC's Good Morning America. But it also had its drawbacks. Rose was showing signs of losing his fastball as he entered his 70s, and King's presence was often insufferable, as she would frequently interrupt Norah's interviews and inject her own lightweight opinions into them.

Then, in 2017, news reports revealed that Rose had a 20-year history of sexually harassing co-workers, and he was fired from his role as CBS This Morning co-anchor. The news hit Norah particularly hard, as her reporting style meshed well with Rose's famed interviewing skills. When she and King returned to the program a few days after the shocking news, she read a statement that said in no uncertain terms that Rose's behavior could not be tolerated in the modern workplace.

The show foundered from that upheaval, going through a plethora of temporary co-anchors and losing ground in the ratings. But by 2019, Norah had already established herself as the rising star at CBS News, and that's when she was chosen to succeed Jeff Glor as anchor of the evening news in an effort to raise the program from a distant last place in the Nielsen ratings.

Almost immediately, Norah wielded extraordinary power over the news division. The nightly telecast was moved from New York to Washington, in part to accommodate her family life (she is married to Washington restauranteur Geoff Tracy and they have three children), at the same time claiming that Washington was the best location to get the pulse of the nation and have rapid access to big national and world stories breaking in the nation's capital.

Norah became CBS' lead anchor in 2019.

Almost as rapidly, the tone of the nightly newscast changed -- and not necessarily for the better.

As a long-time news viewer raised in the Cronkite era, I always believed CBS to be the most serious in tone of the three network newscasts. Even through the anchoring tenures of Dan Rather, Bob Schieffer, Katie Couric, Scott Pelley and Glor, I saw CBS as the harder-news option among the three. But when Norah took over, there were obvious changes -- more feature material, lighter-toned pop culture stories and a strong emphasis upon features and stories about groundbreaking women.

Granted, women probably are the most underrepresented demographic in the world of news. And it's probably the vestigial remnants of male privilege that still reside deep within me that prompted me to consider the sudden increase in coverage of women's issues as disproportional over the course of a 30-minute telecast. I'm sure many would disagree with me, and they are probably correct to do so.

I've come to regard the NBC Nightly News as the current hard-news leader (except for the constant promotion that telecast has of the network's special-event programming, like the Olympics), and I see ABC's telecast as Fox News Lite, with a somewhat sensationalistic tone and a reliance upon the old trope, "If it bleeds, it leads."

But all three programs are practically irrelevant in today's news landscape. People are hardly watching any of them anymore. And the CBS Evening News on Norah's watch failed to make a dent in the ratings. I watched loyally for about a year after she became the anchor, but gradually, my viewing became more sporadic as daily life imposed itself upon the 6:30-7 p.m. window. Most of the daily reporting also shows up on my Facebook feed, so I could pick and choose what and when I wanted to see.

Following the announcement of Norah's departure and reassignment, CBS will return the show to New York (more cost effective) and change the format to closely resemble the news division's stalwart 60 Minutes, emphasizing longer story segments and investigations. As she is already a frequent contributor to 60 Minutes, Norah will likely contribute frequently to the new version of the nightly newscast in her new role as a modern-day Barbara Walters.

Norah reporting from Helsinki.

It's not like she didn't try to make a larger impact. CBS put Norah out front from the very start of her anchor tenure. They put her in military aircraft during rescue or reconnaissance missions, at the scenes of weather-related disasters, in Minneapolis during the unrest that followed George Floyd's death at the hands of local police, overseas for important summit meetings -- and she was relentless in her pursuit of the facts behind sexual harassment of female cadets at the country's military academies, winning prestigious awards for her reporting. 

She was the lead anchor for political coverage. She also revived an old Murrow-era standby called "Person to Person," a show that appeared on CBS News' online site that featured her interviewing celebrities with a lighter tone to give her some pop culture cred. And she went public with her skin cancer diagnosis and was an advocate for early detection and treatment.

She gave it a good five-year college try in the big job. And her legacy may be that of being the anchor of the last traditional nightly newscast CBS produced. That's far more a reflection upon the American viewing public and its short and dubious attention span than it is upon her performance in the job.

Before I close, I will admit to a certain level of disappointment that my path has never crossed with Norah's, even though we've come close on occasion.

Norah was born and raised in San Antonio and spent her formative years as part of a military family, living in South Korea for a few years. She later attended Georgetown University -- but somewhere along the way, and heaven knows how, she became a huge fan of the New England Patriots. She's attended several games over the years -- occasionally as a guest in Robert Kraft's private box -- and she's even reported stories here, including an in-depth look at Tom Brady's TB12 training facility at Patriot Place while she was a co-anchor on CBS This Morning.

I was on the Patriots beat at the time, of course, and I didn't know until after the fact that she had conducted an interview at the training facility on a day when I was attending to the usual daily coverage at the stadium. 

Now, there is no way that I would have tried to weasel my way into her interview session. That would have been totally unprofessional. But what if she might have wanted to drop in on a daily Bill Belichick press conference just out of curiosity, given her abiding love for the team? I definitely would have mustered the courage to introduce myself and express my respect for her professional accomplishments -- and hopefully keep it polite, dignified and nowhere near as creepy as it may sound. After all, for heaven's sake, I'm sure I would have remembered that I was a grown man 20 years older than her, and that I've been around celebrities all my professional life without acting like a gushing idiot.

I'm pretty sure I would have. Pretty sure.

Anyway, I offer my best wishes to Norah O'Donnell as she embarks upon her new responsibilities at CBS News following the election. And I repeat what I said earlier in this post -- if you, dear reader, are a young woman entering journalism or know one that is, please take note of how Norah O'Donnell took every step up the ladder, with professionalism, an unimpeachable work ethic, and a dedication to excellence worthy of the legacy of titans of the business such as Walter Cronkite. Embrace her as a worthy role model.