TV NEWS - Awake and hungry for news

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Monday, November 26, 2001

Awake and Hungry for News
As viewers await word of the war, the newsier 'Good Morning America' advances on front-runner 'Today.'

By ELIZABETH JENSEN, Times Staff Writer

     NEW YORK—ABC's "Good Morning America" opened its program last Monday with these urgent words: "Just hours ago, a convoy of Western journalists was attacked in Afghanistan. Four are missing. We'll have the story."
     NBC's rival "Today" show could not have been more different, as co-anchor Katie Couric began: "Good morning. Everyone is wild about Harry. 'Harry Potter & the Sorcerer's Stone' soared into the record books this weekend, shattering box-office records and causing children across the country to beg their parents to see it again."
     Could these disparate approaches—more so-called hard news at ABC and more feature-driven soft news at NBC—be the reason why "Good Morning America" is gaining viewers and longtime dominant "Today" is losing them?
     Data from ratings service Nielsen Media Research does indicate a shift is occurring. For the period of Nov. 5-9, the last week for which final national figures are available, "Today" was on top—as it has been for 308 weeks, or nearly six full years—with 6.02 million viewers on average versus ABC's 5.14 million. Yet that gap of 880,000 viewers was the closest the two have been since Nov, 25, 1996, when a mere 700,000 viewers separated them. CBS' "Early Show" remained third, with 2.79 million viewers.
     Ratings for Nov. 12-16 will be released today, but preliminary numbers from major markets show an even closer race.
     The root causes of ratings swings are almost impossible for even veteran TV researchers to pinpoint with certainty, but given the value of the "Today" franchise, the shift has caused considerable soul-searching at NBC. Neal Shapiro, president of NBC News, has been meeting with "Today" producers in an effort to ascertain what's wrong and quell grumbling that the problem is executive producer Jonathan Wald, who assumed the post in May, replacing Jeff Zucker, who left to become president of NBC Entertainment.
     "Today" is not Shapiro's only concern: ABC's morning ascent in the morning is echoed in the evening as well, where ABC's "World News Tonight With Peter Jennings" has beaten the long-dominant "NBC Nightly News With Tom Brokaw" in total viewers for the last three weeks.
     The numbers have been cause for celebration internally at ABC, but executives officially remain cautious. "We're happy that viewers are coming," said ABC News President David Westin. "But we're far from finished, and it would be a mistake to overreact to short-term swings in the ratings."
     The change in fortunes has been most pronounced since the Sept. 11 terror attacks. Since that date, "Good Morning America" has increased its audience by an average of 400,000 viewers, while "Today" has declined by 450,000 viewers. Season to date, "Today" is off 7%, while ABC is up 9% and CBS is up 15%.
     Also in the mix is CNN, which put a new Paula Zahn-hosted morning show on the air after Sept. 11. With the show, ratings have quadrupled for the cable channel from 7 to 10 a.m. (ET), which for the week ending Nov. 16 drew an average 882,000 viewers, compared to 187,000 in the time period previously year-to-date.
     At ABC, executives attribute the change to viewers clueing in to the serious news background of hosts Diane Sawyer and Charles Gibson at a time when the country is hanging on developments in Afghanistan and the domestic war on terror. ABC bet big when it shook up the morning show in 1999 by bringing in Sawyer and Gibson, a former co-host of the program, from prime-time newsmagazine assignments.
     "We just feel like everybody is finally catching up to what we've always thought," said "Good Morning America" executive producer Shelley Ross. "We knew coming in that morning habits are very slow to change, so we just had to find windows of opportunity and build."
     Ross called her staff a finely tuned machine, covering a story "that draws on the strength of our anchors." Sawyer, she noted, went to Afghanistan in 1996 to report on the repression of women, while Gibson spent more than a decade covering Washington.
     Westin is reluctant to make absolute conclusions, but said, "My instincts tell me at the moment we're beginning to benefit from two things. We put into place some plans and some people awhile ago now  ... and I think we're beginning to see some benefit from that." Secondly, he said, the current news, while a "tragic story," allows the program to "show off some of [its] strengths  ... viewers are very sophisticated about whether people know what they're covering."
     As for the mix of hard and soft stories, a Project for Excellence in Journalism study released last week found that since Sept. 11, "Good Morning America" has emerged as the most serious of the three network morning newscasts, doing more hard news (63%) and less celebrity and lifestyle reporting (17%) than the other two.
     By contrast, according to the study, hard news has made up 59% of "Today," with 25% devoted to celebrities and lifestyles. CBS, it said, does the least hard news (53%) and the most celebrity and lifestyle coverage (30%).
     NBC executives bristle at the idea they aren't focusing on news or that the ABC team has stronger news credentials than Couric, in particular, a former Pentagon correspondent (co-anchor Matt Lauer was previously a local news anchor and "Today" newscaster). In addition, Wald came to "Today" with serious news credentials, having been executive producer of "NBC Nightly News."
     "I had a hard news background, in addition to knowing the lyrics of every song recorded since 1960 on," Wald joked. "I actually have that rare combination of hard news background and love of pop culture."
     As for the news mix, he said, "There is no strategy to do less hard news .... Our mission is the same: Give you the hard news, what's going on, how the world is affected, what people are talking about."
     Still, some of Wald's news judgments have raised eyebrows in rival newsrooms, such as the decision one day to devote a half-hour to New York's mayoral candidates.
     Ratings "go up, and ratings go down. The business is cyclical and volatile," Wald said. Even so, he acknowledged that the show is "looking at everything," from story selection to presentation, in an effort to shore up its viewing levels, although he repeatedly declined to be specific. "If the bounce that ABC has gotten raises our game a little bit, we welcome that," Wald said, adding that as a newcomer to "Today" his perspective can help keep the show fresh.
     Other factors could be at play. Local station WNBC in New York is off 25% in the time period from a year ago (when its ratings were boosted by the post-presidential election drama), which executives attribute in part to transmission woes after the station's transmitter was destroyed in the World Trade Center collapse; however, ABC's local New York station has experienced the same problems.
     NBC has a couple of likely ratings-boosters on the horizon, including the show's 50th anniversary in January and the Winter Olympics in February. But it also has a potentially bigger change to contemplate: Couric has not hid the fact that she is looking around at other options, such as a daytime talk show, after her contract expires next summer.
     "We love Katie, and I believe Katie loves us," said Wald, who got his job in part because of lobbying by Couric. "You have to work under the assumption that she is staying here. She's energized and has enjoyed reporting on what is most likely the biggest story of our lifetime."




-- Anonymous, November 26, 2001

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