Susan Zirinsky Urges Documentarians To “Keep Your Moral Compass” & Refuse To Pay Contributors – Mip TV

Max Goldbart
·2 min read

Susan Zirinsky has criticized documentarians who pay their contributors as she urges her fellow execs to “keep your moral compass.”

The former CBS News President, who is now running CBS production outfit See it Now Studios, joked “you may as well strip me naked and beat me” rather than asking her to pay participants and sources.

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“Ken Burns never pays, Alex Gibney never pays, but there is a camp that feels you should pay,” she added. “But for us if you pay someone you will never believe that what they are telling you is something you want to hear. I will walk away before one dime is given for a story.”

Zirinksy launched See It Now around one and a half years ago and the company is producing content for both Paramount’s brands including Paramount+ and Smithsonian Channel, along with pitching to third parties such as Netflix and Amazon Prime Video.

“It’s great to produce within the [Paramount] family but if you produce something from the outside and if you succeed you become more special,” she added, stating that See It Now is currently making 51 hours of content including the likes of Never Seen Again.

Zirinsky was delivering a keynote at Mip TV’s MipDoc Co-Pro Summit in Cannes.

Reflecting on her time at CBS, she said when she became CBS News President, “several leaders had fallen off the cliff and it was a perfect time for me to reset the agenda.”

She replaced David Rhodes in 2019, just after Les Moonves stepped down due to allegations of sexual misconduct. Numerous commissioners left over the following couple of years.

“I had to establish a moral compass and literally put us back together again,” added Zirinsky.

She backed her “clever” decision to strike a two-year deal at the time, coinciding with CBS Entertainment boss George Cheeks’ desire to launch a production studio, which she did in September 2021 with See It Now.

Reflecting on the current state of the doc market, Zirinsky said she “fears” the genre is becoming overly commercial.

“The good news about the streaming boom is more work but the bad news is shorter deadlines,” she went on to say. “We need smaller companies to make smaller films but the question is who will buy these? It’s a constant struggle.”

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