Here's the News: Old Is In

By James Poniewozik

About a year ago, we heard that network news was in for a big makeover. The guard was changing, excitement was in the air, and a new anchor was about to turn around the fortunes of a network.

All of which happened, kind of--just with a different anchor. Nearly a year after taking over ABC's second-place evening newscast, Charles Gibson is neck and neck in the ratings with NBC's Brian Williams, and Gibson recently won ABC its first news sweeps month in more than 10 years. Katie Couric, who was supposed to be the agent of change, lags about 2 million viewers behind.

Gibson's success has been seen as a vindication of old-fashioned gravitas over flash. Which is fair enough; Gibson is a trustworthy anchor heading a good, consistent newscast--Sanka to Couric's espresso. But while he may have struck a blow for TV's past, his success and Couric's struggle may not be the best sign for the evening news' future.

CBS's decision to reformat its newscast and poach Couric may have been overhyped and gimmicky. But it was also optimistic, quixotic, even. Journalists dismissed CBS CEO Les Moonves, a show-biz guy and former actor, for taking it on himself to "blow up" the news. But at least he believed something few of them did: that the evening news could reverse its long decline, attracting brand-new viewers with all their original teeth, rather than just fighting over a shrinking pie.

For a heady moment, even CBS's competitors seemed to believe it. There was a swagger among news divisions, which hoped the new attention would change the perception that they were dinosaurs. "Nightly news," wrote American Journalism Review, "is hot again."

Or not. When the dust cleared, the overall nightly news audience was around 25 million and gradually falling, much as before. And Gibson, the one anchor to have a bit of success, was the anti-Couric: avuncular, male, older (he replaced Elizabeth Vargas, two decades his junior) and unreliant on innovations like Op-Ed segments. Hiring him implied an entirely different view of TV news and its future. CBS was programming for the viewers network news wanted. ABC was programming to keep the viewers network news already had, for as long as the Grim Reaper would permit.

Looks like ABC made the right pick. Of course, network news has a complex ecology. Couric may have been a poor fit, CBS's changes too major or too minor. Gibson may be doing well because Couric dislodged NBC fans who then sampled him, or because many ABC affiliates have Oprah before the local news.

Regardless, after all the money and attention spent on Couric, it will be much harder for a network exec to justify trying to widen the larger news audience. The journalistic lesson of Gibson's success and Couric's fizzling is that you can do well in the ratings with simple, unflashy news, and that's fine. But the business lesson is that trying to find new viewers--in the face of generational change, technological rivals and changing work and family schedules--to replace dying ones is pointless. TV-news analyst Andrew Tyndall, publisher of the Tyndall Report website, told me, "It's the wrong idea to think you can grow the overall audience on broadcast television."

As someone who watches TV for a living yet gets most news online or off cable, I think he's right. (Not just about TV news but most of the mass media.) But it's still sad to see TV news giving up on that dream, and the ambitions that go with it. It may be easy to mock Couric's palsy-walsy tone and Anchorman references, but at least she's trying to get new viewers' attention. Is change good for its own sake? In one way, yes. There's an intangible complacency that comes when you decide your mission is to slow your losses and run out the clock.

There's an alternative, though. As Tyndall notes, the networks--which still have a bigger news audience than cable--may find a future online. But to make that transition, they'll have to be open to changing their flagship evening shows, even shrinking them by losing longtime viewers with shocks to the system like Couric. They may have to die a little to be reborn. I don't blame evening-news stalwarts for spending their evenings with Charlie. But if they love their network news, they should keep their fingers crossed for Katie.