Not long after the death of CBS Television Distribution CEO Roger King last December, speculation mounted as to which of the two co-presidents of the CBS syndication division would ascend to the top job.

Both had solid credentials.

John Nogawski had been president of CBS Paramount Domestic Television for four years before it merged with King World in September 2006.

But Bob Madden was Roger King’s right-hand man going back to the days when King World was an independent publicly traded company.

The uncertainty ended last month with the announcement that Nogawski would be the new president. Madden would stick around as senior executive vice president, responsible for managing CBS’s critical partnership with Sony Pictures Television (Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune) and Harpo Productions (The Oprah Winfrey Show).

Nogawski now sits atop the most powerful company in syndication with shows that regularly top the syndication ratings charts. In addition to Jeopardy!, Wheel and Oprah, the company distributes Entertainment Tonight, Judge Judy, Dr. Phil, Judge Joe Brown, Inside Edition and Rachael Ray.

Given the stable of staples, he could adopt a just-don’t-screw-it-up philosophy, but, in this interview with TVNEWSDAY Editor Harry A. Jessell, he says he wants to reinvent the company for the new multiplatform age.

He says he is looking for new ways to repurpose and promote his shows on the Web, while aggressively seeking the next new first-run hit. And, if one or two of the shows he now has in development comes to fruition, he might even bring CBS back to NATPE.

An edited transcript:

Let’s start with a very broad question: What are the challenges and opportunities for CBS Television in the immediate future?

On the development side, we’re already looking at four different projects for 2009—none that I can go into great detail about yet.

We are also working for some big advances in the online space and we hope to begin showing the fruits of that labor probably around the first of the year. Those initiatives will take us outside our normal box into partnerships with some Web portals and some other major Web sites where we’ll start sharing our content in a way to further monetize it as well as to promote it.

We will also be reorganizing our company—not that anything is broken. But as a result of us having a major change at the top, we have decided that we are going to look at all the different areas inside our company and how we take what’s been working and use it and take what’s not working and kind of clean that up and do things better. Those things will probably hit starting by the fall of ’08 and certainly going into 2009.

How about some details on the four shows that you have in development?

I can tell you that they are all talent related. I can’t really go into any detail beyond that. We’re still in the process of signing up these people and deciding exactly what it is we’d be doing with them.

Oprah is developing a show around Dr. Mehmet Oz and is looking for a distributor. Everybody figures you to have the inside track on that show. Do you?

Well, she’s her own entity. You know, this reminds me of how it was with Dr. Phil. Everyone pitched that show at that time in New York. I walked in behind [Warner Bros.’s Dick Robertson and Jim Paratore. Then, as we were coming out of the room, Roger [King] and Bob Madden were standing there. So it’s the same process.

She and her team are going to look at everybody. The way people probably perceive it is that we might have an inside track just because we have done things with her, but we have nothing contractually that says we get her next venture.

When do you expect a decision on that?

I think they’re looking at trying to do something quickly, a week or a month. It’s probably in that time frame, but, you know, that’s their decision.

Now to your second point, online. You know the networks are all taking their primetime shows and putting them online. Are you thinking about doing the same thing?

Not the shows themselves. We’re really looking at what are the pieces that we’ve either produced or could produce to accent or augment our shows and our brand in the marketplace. So I’m not really into a rebroadcast. That’s where the networks have gone. I don’t really see us as playing the game that same way.

You don’t need to watch 22-and-a-half minutes in order to really get the experience. What people are coveting from our shows is the information that they provide. Look at Entertainment Tonight and all the different pieces that are wrapped up in that show. We can slice and dice and offer the pieces as breaking news or as a kind of Wikipedia of entertainment.

If you look at Dr. Phil and Rachael Ray, you can kind of see how they can be broken up into pieces that provide tips or recipes—information that people are looking for to either solve their problems or answer their questions.

What about a broadcaster coming to you and saying, “I really would like to put Jeopardy! online in my market and I can geofilter it so that nobody outside my market can see it.” Are you game for that?

I wouldn’t want to say that I’m completely adverse to it. It just really hasn’t been the path that we feel is going to be the most advantageous for us at this point in time.

On the organizational point, are we going to see some changes in personnel?

We have a lot of very, very smart people here. What I’m looking to do now is get those people to start thinking differently about what they do. It’s not about just selling TV shows.

I want to challenge our people to come up with new ideas about how we can do things better or about what are we not doing yet that we need to begin doing, even though the idea may be making money on a much lesser scale than we’re used to. You know, it may not be a $40 million profit situation. It might just be $1 million. It might be $500,000.

It’s got to start somewhere. If we don’t learn it now, a year or two down the road, everybody else will be running their third lap and we’ll just be starting. We don’t plan on letting that happen.

I was looking at the numbers and one of the things that jumps out is that Oprah is down 15 percent season to date—or at least she was before she put the Pregnant Man on. She’s been falling off slowly over the last few years and rather precipitously this year. Can you comment on that?

I really don’t think it’s Oprah alone. You’ve seen it across every single area whether you’re looking at daytime or primetime. There’s been some softening in some numbers. The writers’ strike didn’t help and certainly some of that crossed over from primetime and into our area.

It’s one of those peaks and valleys that you go through. What’s happened with Oprah isn’t a whole lot different than what we’ve experienced on all of our shows. When that type of thing happens, the really great shows dig down deep, figure out a way to do it a little bit differently, then just stretch themselves. That’s what you’ll see with Oprah.

I know that’s what you’re going to see with Phil. I’ve been seeing us do that for 20 years with Entertainment Tonight. When the numbers start to soften, you’ve got to sit down in a room and figure out how to shake it up. Then you go out and promote it effectively and the audience comes.

I don’t want to put too much emphasis on the fact that something is slumping. It really just pushes us all to figure out how to get it back up.

You have a great collection of first-run shows, but with stations tightening their belts and ratings down across the board, how do you grow revenue and profits from those shows? It’s going to be tough to increase license fees when those shows come up for renewal and demand the higher CPMs, isn’t it?

The conversation I have with any station that is in a renewal situation is, OK, I still have eight of the top 10 shows and if you don’t have one of those eight, then you’re going to be buying something that’s going to be doing much smaller numbers, which is just then like an avalanche to a television station.

The ABC O&Os are the best example of how to do it right with their syndicated products. They’ve held on to Oprah and Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy! and so they are solid from 3 or 4 o’clock through to 8 o’clock. That regularity has been amazing for the success of those stations. Another example is our CBS stations. They’ve acquired, just in recent months, either Judge Judy and/or Dr. Phil in a lot of markets. They have ET and the Insider running in access. The regularity of that lineup is really starting to kick in. In many cases, they have taken those shows from the NBC O&Os and I’m seeing the success the NBC stations were having move over to CBS. So, even though the numbers might not be quite as big as they once were, having the key franchises is how you’re successful.

Once you’re a success—once you’re a franchise and something that stations fear losing—you hold your rate because they realize for their long-term business interest, they need to keep the franchise. They can’t afford it to move over to the other stations.

Are you going to be going back to NATPE next year?

We’re assessing that right now. We just had a meeting where we discussed that. I don’t know when we’ll make our final decision, but it’s certainly being evaluated.

Are you leaning that way?

We want to be where our clients are and I think a lot has to do with the attendance and a lot has to do with how much business we may have to write there. It’s really a combination of the two. Right now, with what we are preparing in development, if one or two of those becomes the direction we’re going, I’d be really surprised if we didn’t have to more seriously consider going.

You’ve been one of the companies that have been pretty aggressive on the HD front with Jeopardy!, Wheel and Oprah in the fall.

Yes. We just announced ET and The Insider.

Yes you did. But what about your other big shows—Rachael Ray, Dr. Phil, Judge Judy? Any plans on those?

They’re all being looked at. I mean ultimately all of our shows will be in HD. We are moving ET and The Insider from the Paramount lot into our new facility so there was no sense in starting a brand new operation and not at the same time converting to HD.

With the broadcasters' switch to digital next year, you really have to be thinking which shows do you do it with, when do you do it, is it cost effective, what’s the return you’re going to get. But, ultimately, they’re all going to be there. It’s probably one or two years away.

Before you get the whole family in high def?

Yes. I mean it’s a major investment, you know. It’s not just as easy as just flipping a switch. It’s all your cameras. It’s your control room. We have a lot of TV shows. So to convert our entire process over is a cost thing and then it’s a learning thing. This year we’re going to learn a lot by moving ET and The Insider over to HD. That process will help us determine how we approach the other shows.

What do you think about this super group headed by one guy, Randy Michaels. He is not only representing the Tribune stations, but also Local TV—the old New York Times group—and a string of small market Fox stations that it just bought up. Is he the most powerful buyer in syndication today?

I’d say that he certainly is ranking up there with somebody you'd better have in your Rolodex. Look, they’re a group that has a lot of holes. So, do I look at them as somebody who is a target for great television shows? Absolutely. They’ve got a whole lot of real estate that’s sitting there crying out for some hits and we’d like to be providing one of those hits to them. We’re already in conversations with those guys.

According to Variety, Tribune is considering resurrecting its syndication arm and taking a do-it-yourself approach.

It wasn’t all that long ago that they were in that business. With this new management, they seem to be very aggressively looking at different ways of doing business. [Tribune’s] Ed Wilson is a friend. I look at the future relationship between their company and ours as one where I could really see something being forged very easily and I look forward to it. I don’t look at them as a threat. They can only produce so many shows on their own. They have an entire lineup that they need help with. There’s no way that they’re going to be able to take over every single time period with their own productions. We’ve all learned that lesson. You can’t do it all on your own. No one has the monopoly on good ideas. So, I think they’re willing to share the stage.

Your big show for this fall is The Doctors. What are your plans for promoting it?

I can just tell you we have more creative ideas for launching this show and they will become evident to the world over the next few months.

We’ll be using the Web, every possible platform. There’s going to be a media blitz. We’re going to get these people out into the world. Those faces are going to be well-known entities by the time the fall gets here.

The production itself is so well underway that by the time this show goes on it’s going to look like we’re in year two, not year one. I’m looking really forward to it.