NETWORK NEWS A new era for anchors

Replacements for Brokaw, Rather and Jennings face declining interest in network news.
By KEN PARISH PERKINS
Knight Ridder Newspapers
S EARLY AS AGE 8, BRIAN Williams would stand in the bathroom of his upstate New York home and deliver the news through a paper-towel roll. He has always been relentlessly driven for the things he holds dear, be they fast cars or the Holy Grail of TV journalism.
Williams never chased his NASCAR dreams, partly because, I suspect, they might have negated the one he really wanted: network news anchordom.
On Thursday, after a lifetime of waiting and a decade of being groomed for the job, Williams takes over "NBC Nightly News" from departing legend Tom Brokaw. It will be the first time in 20 years that the anchor chair of a Big Three network will belong to someone other than the Supreme Court Justices of TV News: 64-year-old Brokaw, ABC's Peter Jennings, 66, and 73-year-old Dan Rather of CBS, who announced last week that he will vacate his anchor post March 9.
Williams confesses to having a romantic vision of life as a network anchor -- the stability, the power, the financial reward. He's had his eye on this prize a long time. So long, perhaps, that he can't see that it has lost much of its luster.
Ask almost anyone how often they tune in to one of the three network broadcasts, and the answer more than likely would be "rarely, if ever," or "when the sky appears to be falling."
The networks' nightly newscasts, which still command a large share of viewers (30 million collectively) when compared with cable news outlets like CNN and the Fox News Channel, have seen their audience cut in half since 1981. In fact, if you examine the numbers of the past decade, it illustrates just how swiftly viewers are finding their news elsewhere, whether it's on cable or on the Web. According to Nielsen Media Research, the average audience for network news has declined by 10 million viewers, from 36.3 million in 1994 to 26.3 million in 2004.
So if Brokaw, Jennings and Rather are the last of a select line of network news royalty, what does that make Williams? The prince who showed up too late for the ball?
Sinking ships
I think the pace of viewer hemorrhaging will quicken even more once Rather and Jennings depart, leaving Williams and Rather's replacement (White House reporter John Roberts and reporter Scott Pelley apparently lead the pack) as captains of sinking ships. At some point, the networks, while not shutting down their entire news divisions, might have to at least put a halt to airing those daily half-hour newscasts -- the news division's flagship showcases that contain all of about 18 minutes of news apiece.
The larger question might be: Would we even miss it?
This summer, Andrew Heyward, president of CBS News, called this theory "preposterous," that we'd never see the nightly network newscasts fold up their tents. Well, odder things have happened over the past 20 years, such as the ability to turn on your TV at 3 a.m. and be fed news updates from multiple sources.
Brokaw, who is leaving after 23 years on the job, acknowledges that "people don't make the same investment" they did in watching network news, but it's important to have one place every night on a medium that is available to everyone, without having to pay.
"We're going through a profound evolution in our profession about how people access information, retrieve it and use it for their own purposes," Brokaw says. "And the place of the network anchorman will be a part of that."
How, exactly, did network anchors and the newscasts that made them superstars fall into such hardship? TV execs too often point to factors beyond their control: audience fragmentation in a sea of cable choices, the disappearance of young viewers who prefer anti-establishment sources such as Comedy Central's "The Daily Show With Jon Stewart," the budget-tightening of bottom-line-hungry corporate owners, a changing family dynamic that makes catching a 6:30 p.m. newscast nearly impossible.
'News you can use'
My, how things have changed since 1963, when the network anchor was defined as an authoritative reporter, a calm and cool news reader (sometimes with a cigarette dangling from his mouth) and the nation's emotional proxy at historic events.
The Kennedy assassination changed the balancing power of network news, which was lauded for its immediacy. The anchor, particularly Walter Cronkite, became a steady force for the masses, a father figure. (It was always a man, and, while there have been brief interludes of women such as Barbara Walters and Connie Chung, and African-Americans, such as Max Robinson, it's still a white male.)
The evening news was at its most powerful during the difficult days: the assassination of JFK, the Vietnam War, Watergate.
But that chokehold on audiences has been loosening ever since a crowd of competition arrived. Viewers went trolling for other intelligent life and, feeling insecure, newscasts themselves began tinkering with their approaches, not always favorably.
Many focused on entertaining rather than informing, a strategy that has slowly emphasized softer "news you can use" over the hard news that initially gave national newscasts an important role in democracy.
Anyone who watched the political conventions and the election coverage knows that network news anchors are still significant fixtures. But nowadays, they're not even considered the most valuable players within their own networks. At NBC, "Today" co-host Katie Couric takes home $16 million a year and is considered the network's franchise talent.
Whereas Jennings, Rather and Brokaw earned their jobs as hard-nosed journalists brought up through the trenches as war reporters and foreign correspondents, the criteria for today's new stars has changed with the atmosphere of jazzy sets, sexier news presentations and "watchable" anchors.
Williams ought to feel right at home. His reputation is that of professional anchor, like the William Hurt character in "Broadcast News." He looks good, speaks well and does skillfully what anchors do.
But is that enough to hold onto NBC's top spot in the network-news ratings?
Rather's heirs
"If you're asking if we think we made the right decision with Brian -- that answer is yes, we did," says NBC News President Neal Shapiro. "If you're asking if we're realistic in knowing the great challenge of changing something that hasn't changed in 20 years, no matter who you put up there, that answer is yes, too."
NBC officially announced Williams as Brokaw's successor two years ago. In the past year, Shapiro dispatched Williams to do more-significant field reporting. He covered the primaries, conventions, the Summer Olympics, elections and numerous stories in between for his high-profile "Assignment America" series on "Nightly News."
As news executives often do, Shapiro points to NBC's own in-house research that says when Williams is exposed to viewers on a consistent basis, "they really like him. That's par for the course with solid anchors. They tend to win you over in time, once viewers feel they know him."
For now, ABC doesn't appear to have much of a succession plan in place, which will only hurt in the long run. Charles Gibson is a frequent sub for Jennings on "World News Tonight," but having cemented his softer side as a goofy, grinning morning host on "Good Morning America," it's hard to take what he says even remotely seriously. Besides, Gibson himself is in his 60s.
Roberts and Pelley, the two most-talked-about Rather heirs, are, at least, in their 40s. But because Rather's announcement was something of a surprise, coming in the wake of his controversial and questionable report on President Bush's National Guard service, CBS has been very quiet about successors. CBS Chairman Leslie Moonves said last week that he didn't expect to name a new anchor until the new year.
With CBS a distant third in the nightly news ratings, averaging 9.8 million, we might see the network try something different with its newscast.
Williams, however, doesn't plan on rocking the boat for now.
"Why would I take the No. 1 evening newscast and change a hair on its head other than the obvious change of the new anchor?" he asks. "I am by nature a different guy than Tom. We read at different speeds, we're different ages, we look different. It's his audience. I don't pretend to think that, initially, they are going to be there just for me."