Network TV Newsroom Investment

Even more than staff size, bureaus, or other newsroom statistics, though, much of the 2005 discussion of investment in network news stemmed from changes behind the anchor desks. What kind of investment would each of the networks make in choosing replacements? Would they bring someone with fresh ideas to shake up and hopefully add life to the struggling broadcasts in the long run? Would they stay with what they already knew? How much support would the new anchors have? How much money could be saved by replacing a celebrity with a relative rookie? How much money would have to be spent to attract another network’s celebrity to jump ship?

ABC

In early April 2005, ABC found itself in an unexpected position. The only Big Three network that was expected to maintain its evening news anchor lost that advantage when Peter Jennings took leave to undergo chemotherapy treatments for lung cancer. Anticipating the 67-year old Jennings’s return, the network filled the anchor position temporarily, rotating between the “20/20” co-anchor Elizabeth Vargas and “Good Morning America’s” Charles Gibson. As it would play out, Jennings would not return. The man who had been the “ABC World News Tonight” anchor for 22 years lost his cancer battle on August 7.

Jennings’s death left ABC in a different position from its rivals. At CBS, Dan Rather’s final days as anchor were marred by “Memogate” and third-place ratings, and management seemed almost eager to move out from under his shadow, not asking Rather to cover Hurricane Katrina, precisely his kind of story. At NBC, viewers saw anchor Tom Brokaw gradually hand the reins over to Brian Williams. Jennings’s departure, by contrast, was unplanned and unwanted. In the end, though, ABC seems to have invested heavily in the future.

After months of mulling it over, ABC announced in early December 2005 that it would move the broadcast to a two-anchor format. Elizabeth Vargas and Bob Woodruff would now fill Jennings’s chair. Not since the 1960s when Chet Huntley and David Brinkley anchored for NBC had a multiple anchor arrangement led to a No. 1 ranking in a national newscast. The four subsequent attempts all proved problematic. Barbara Walters and Harry Reasoner anchored the ABC newscast starting in 1976. Jennings, Max Robinson and Frank Reynolds tri-anchored for ABC from 1978 to 1983 (with Reynolds in D.C., Robinson in Chicago and Jennings as foreign desk anchor). Roger Mudd and Tom Brokaw co-anchored on NBC between April 1982 and September 1983, when Brokaw took over as the solo anchor. Dan Rather and Connie Chung shared the CBS anchor desk from 1993 to 1995.

The most basic problem, according to the conventional wisdom, is that in a modern 30-minute network newscast (18 minutes of news time) dominated by correspondent packages, the anchor is on screen talking for only about 5.5 minutes. Unlike local TV newscasts around the country, which are on for many more hours and involve fewer correspondents and more anchor “tell stories,” that might not be enough airtime to share.

ABC’s argument is that in the 21 st century, that may be changing. The network says it plans to make the anchors more onscreen — and on-the-road —reporters rather than omniscient news readers. And as the network newscast moves into an online environment, where the user is deciding which stories to access, the single anchor is no longer the navigator of the news. The consumer may be. In that environment, two anchors may be two brand figures, covering stories, being on the scene, offering flexibility. In a USA Today article on January 3, 2006 , the day of the debut of ABC’s new setup for “World News Tonight,” co-anchor Vargas was quoted as saying, “This is not a cosmetic dual-anchor role… This is two people doing two people’s work.”7 As executives at ABC see it, one anchor could be reporting from the field while another worked from inside the studio. When “World News’s” new anchors made their formal debut, Woodruff reported from Iran while Vargas anchored from the network’s New York studio.

The strategy is not without its consequences, as ABC learned after Woodruff was seriously injured while reporting from Iraq when an improvised explosive device struck the convoy he and cameraman Doug Vogt were traveling in. It was unclear, as of March 2006, if Woodruff would recover enough to return to his job, and if so, whether he would ever be healthy enough to resume the role of field reporter ABC imagined. If not, one question was whether ABC and other networks would see Woodruff’s injury as too great a risk and retreat from the anchor-as-field-reporter strategy.

The dual-anchor format was just one part of ABC’s evening news strategy. Another key element was time.

ABC’s nightly newscast expanded from being simply a broadcast live at 6:30 p.m. on the East Coast. It created three successive live broadcasts that offered the West Coast its own edition rather than an updated taped package. Conscious of the changes that have occurred in the workday since the launch of the 6:30 p.m. broadcast time, “World News Tonight” also created a live 15-minute webcast that can be viewed live at 3 p.m. on ABCNews.com or downloaded anytime after 4 p.m. ET .

CBS

Heading into 2006, the changes facing CBS remained uncertain. The network still needed to find a new anchor for its nightly newscast and a new primary personality to front its news division under a new news president. Perhaps no network had reached the point where it depended as much on a single personality as CBS did on Rather. The network had never succeeded in creating a major morning anchor. Rather also anchored “48 Hours,” one of its prime-time magazines, and the mid-week edition of “60 Minutes” program and operated in any case as a kind of island inside the news division.

Rather already had problems fronting “Evening News” before he left. Since 1997, its viewership had been in decline, and since 1998 it had been sliding deeper and deeper into third place. Even after Rather’s departure the program’s ratings suffered. For the week of April 17, 2005 (about one month after Rather’s departure and after Peter Jennings left the ABC anchor chair) the CBS’s “Evening News” averaged roughly 6 million viewers. According to Media Life Magazine, that was the lowest rating the program had posted “since Nielsen started people meter measurement in 1987.”8

Most of the speculation focused on CBS management’s not-so-private efforts to lure NBC’s “Today Show” host Katie Couric to the “Evening News” anchor chair. Couric made no attempt to deny that such a move was contemplated and even addressed the early critics, such as Jon Friedman at “MarketWatch,” who suggested she lacked the gravitas to anchor in the evening. Bill Carter, in a December 2005 article for the New York Times, wrote that Couric, while acknowledging that the diverse programming of “Today” suited her, “added that she believed the broader television news business was changing. ‘People don't want to see robo-anchors regurgitating whatever is on the teleprompter in front of them. They want people to be natural, people who feel things, who react to things.’9 ” The interim “Evening News” anchor, Bob Schieffer, also gave Couric an early vote of support in December, saying, “I’m hoping we can get her… People believe her. They take her seriously.”10

NBC

On December 2, 2004 , Brian Williams took over the anchor chair at the NBC “Nightly News.” As far as viewership is concerned, NBC and ABC have been in close competition, and some wondered what impact the transition would have.

Nielsen ratings for the week ending January 2, 2005 found NBC (11.2 million viewers) maintaining its lead over ABC (10.4 million viewers) and continuing its dominance over CBS (8.1 million viewers).11

With Williams, the program’s seventh anchor and managing editor, NBC has been working to rewrite the role of the traditional network news anchor. Williams has often stepped from behind the anchor desk, on-camera to cover stories from the field, online in the “Daily Nightly” and even into the guest chair of the leading source of “fake news,” the “Daily Show.”

There are numerous questions to consider moving forward. As the network news programs establish their online identities, will a new audience be created? Will limited resources hinder the possibilities generated by the availability of multiple platforms? Will the network news divisions’ online experiments lead to true innovation?