Eva Pilgrim Wants to Make ‘Inside Edition’ the Talk of the Water Cooler … and TikTok

At a moment when linear TV is in decline, and with the larger TV news landscape under stress, can a 36-year-old syndicated newsmagazine maintain its loyal audience while pursuing new audiences outside the traditional ecosystem?

Eva Pilgrim is betting on it.

The veteran ABC News correspondent and Good Morning America anchor joined the CBS-produced syndicated series Inside Edition last month, and with its new season kicking off Monday night, she is ready to put her mark on the show.

“I grew up watching this show,” Pilgrim says in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter. “It’s only week two. I have a lot of anxiety. I want to do right by this show, because I’ve loved it my whole life. So I hope that all the things that I have learned, and all the traveling and storytelling that I learned and the people that have poured into me will serve me in this moment, but quite honestly, I’m just waiting to see how it all shakes out.”

Pilgrim succeeds Deborah Norville, who announced her exit from Inside Edition in the spring, after 30 years leading the program. Any anchor change on a TV news program is challenging, but that is especially true now, with the desire to retain the millions of loyal linear viewers, while also seeking new audiences that just aren’t seeing the show via that distribution method.

“You want to do right by those people, you want to give them what they expect to see. And I think we’re going to obviously continue to do that, and I hope that I can do it in a way that is both reverent to what the product is, which is the thing that everyone loves,” Pilgrim says. “Deborah is incredible. I mean, she’s a legacy of the business, and she’s been such an inspiration to me as a journalist, a woman, a mom, how she navigated it all with such grace and poise. I take her as an example of what it can be, and what I I can do. And I lean into my own version of it, which is not far off of what she was doing.

“The industry is changing, and I think all of us know that,” Pilgrim adds. “I want to have a job in 10 years, I want a lot of people that I work with to have a job in 10 years. I think there’s real heart in doing right by each other.”

So Pilgrim says that she is betting that Inside Edition can please those longtime loyal viewers, while also expanding the show’s reach on the platforms where, quite frankly, most people are consuming content.

“What’s amazing about what Inside Edition does, and has always done, is those stories that are going viral on TikTok, that people are searching out on Instagram and YouTube. That’s the kind of stories that they tell, and they tell it in a really interesting way,” Pilgrim says. “I’m not young and I’m not old, but my friends, a lot of them, don’t watch on linear television. They’re watching on YouTube, or they’re seeing clips on TikTok, or they’re listening to a podcast. And I think there’s a way to take what we do and very easily, with just a little bit of extra work, move it across to those other places where we’re able to reach people where they are in the way that they want to see stuff on those platforms.

“That was one of the big draws for me, coming to Inside Edition,” she adds. “They’re thinking that way already, and I think there’s more that we can do there to reach more people and give people more of what they’re looking for.”

One advantage that the show has over similarly situated TV news programs? The content. While the show originated as a hard news program anchored by David Frost (of Frost-Nixon fame), it slowly embraced tabloid, true crime and lighter topics under Bill O’Reilly and Norville, genres that still play well on TV, and travel well online.

“They take the stories that people are actually talking about, the stuff that nobody’s afraid to have conversation with their friends about in this day and age where sometimes talking about the news can be not pleasant for everyone in all circles,” Pilgrim says. “But also it’s water cooler stuff … It’s the mystery that we don’t know the answer to yet. We start covering it in the beginning and then watch it unfold with the rest of America. And what I love about it is the newscast always is making you feel good. There’s always a story at the very end of the newscast that’s cute. It’s little kids being adorable, or pets, or something that leaves you walking away where you feel like you smile, you laugh.”

Pilgrim adds, “That feels really nice, especially right now.”