Over the past 18 months, the networks’ nightly newscasts have provided nearly as much news as they’ve covered. Two networks, CBS and ABC, have hired their second and third new anchors, respectively, in that span. The other, NBC, has remained in first place but seen its average margin of victory shrink markedly over recent weeks. In fact, last week ABC’s “World News Tonight” finished ahead of “NBC Nightly News” in total viewers for the first time since August, albeit on a week abbreviated by the July 4 holiday and with Diane Sawyer filling in for regular “WNT” anchor Charles Gibson. NBC also points out that its newscast was delayed in many markets because of overrun from the low-rated Wimbledon tennis championships. The coming months should see yet more shifting, as ABC’s Gibson settles into the anchor chair and CBS’s Katie Couric comes on the air in September. Andrew Tyndall, the noted network news analyst and publisher of The Tyndall Report, talks to Media Life about evening news ratings, why Couric may not draw new viewers to the news, and why ABC is covering fewer family stories.

When was the last time there was this much turmoil in the evening news? Or is this a first?
 
Many changes have happened in the anchor chairs and in the diversification from broadcast to various online offerings.

“Turmoil” implies that these changes are disruptive rather than evidence of fresh thinking and lack of stagnation. I see little evidence of turmoil in the core journalism of the evening newscasts compared with the early ‘90s.

Back then budgets were being cut, bureaus closed, resources were transferred from evening newscasts to the morning programs, the threat posed by CNN was an unknown factor and there was a crisis in self-confidence about story selection — whether to cover hard news or celebrity/tabloid fare.

The crisis reached its climax with the wrongheaded decision to treat the O.J. Simpson trial as a serious story in 1994-1995. It took another five years to regain stability after that.
 

ABC News has been sinking steadily since last fall. How much of that is just because of the loss of Peter Jennings and how much can be attributed to the unstable anchor situation?
 
Since the loss of Peter Jennings was the direct cause of the unstable anchor situation, this is hardly an either/or question. ABC’s standing may be best explained by the unanticipated success of its rivals.

No one expected Bob Schieffer to be [such an] attractive replacement for Dan Rather at CBS. Morale at CBS has improved markedly since Rather/Heyward were replaced by Schieffer/MacManus.

NBC News has done a remarkable job keeping that network afloat despite its poor performance in primetime. Both “Today” and “Nightly News” have prevailed on a fourth-place network.
 

What effect will Katie Couric have on news viewership when she takes over in September? Will she pull new viewers to the news broadcasts?
 
The pool of news viewers available at 6:30 p.m. is defined by sociological and demographic factors rather than by the personality of the network anchors. The news audience grows at the margins during periods of heavy news events, [such as] wars, disasters, terrorist attacks, elections and so on.

Couric’s arrival will presumably increase the amount of sampling of the rival networks’ offerings but is unlikely to convert non-news viewers to the core news audience in that timeslot.
 

Transition periods have been rough on CBS and ABC so far. Why was NBC able to have so much success in their transition from Tom Brokaw to Williams? Was it simply that they’d actually planned for it?
 
I disagree that the transition from Rather-to-Schieffer-to-Couric has been as rough as you assert, so far at least.

If anything, CBS’ “rough” period consisted of Rather’s resistance to change. As for ABC, all the planning in the world could not have prepared them for Jennings’ cancer followed by Woodruff’s injury followed by Vargas’ pregnancy.

It is true, however, that NBC News’s success under Andy Lack in building broadcast leaders in major timeslots--evening news, morning programs, Sunday mornings--a stable of anchors signed to long-term contracts, and a 24-hour cable news operation, albeit a third-place one, allowed for depth of talent and resources that gave NBC a planning edge over its two rivals.

Williams would not have had the opportunity to spend so many years preparing himself to be the “Nightly News” anchor if MSNBC had not been part of NBC News.
 

Dan Rather has joined Mark Cuban’s HDNet for his own news program. Do you expect that will draw any interest? What sort of stories could Rather do there that he couldn’t on CBS?
 
Dan Rather prided himself on being a reporter first and anchor second during most of his time at “CBS Evening News.” However, that reputation overstates the amount of hard news reporting he did in the final six years or so behind the anchor chair.

During that period he was on the road less often and reading a teleprompter more often than in his heyday. Remember that in 1989, for example, he was already in Beijing covering Mikhail Gorbachev before the Tiananmen Square protests even broke out.

The key question about the HDNet venture is whether Rather, at his age, can turn the clock back to a style of journalism he has not done for almost a decade.

It could be that Rather’s reports will be more like Ted Koppel’s project at Discovery — longform think pieces on major trends rather than hard news on-the-ground coverage of breaking stories. For breaking news, television needs a larger organization of production, editing, research and newsgathering than HDNet could probably support.
 

What has been the dominant news story of the summer thus far for the broadcast networks? Why?
 
Internationally, Iraq has continued to dominate the networks’ resources — for the obvious reason that the country is at war, and for the more parochial reason that the networks’ own journalists have been injured and killed in the fighting. Domestically, there has been no dominant story. Probably the illegal immigration story has been the biggest of a series of medium size events.
 

Have you seen any trends in the past year related to how different networks cover different stories? That is, is there one network spending more time on a certain story than another?
 
The biggest difference has been NBC’s decision to stick with the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, arising directly from Brian Williams’ personal experiences. CBS continues to cover overseas news in general more heavily than its rivals, and Iraq in particular. While the pregnant Elizabeth Vargas was anchor, ABC specialized in sex and family features. That emphasis seems to have declined upon her departure.
 

Is there any general trend over the past year in the sort of stories that get big play on the broadcast networks? How does it differ from the big stories on cable?
 
The story selection on cable news tends to be closer to that of the networks’ morning programs than the networks’ evening newscasts. So cable has more tabloid tales, more true crime melodrama, more human interest, more domestic coverage.

The evening newscasts emphasize public policy more: both foreign policy--too much on Iraq compared with the rest of the world--and inside-the-Beltway stories. It is not clear yet that the midterm elections are shaping up as a big story for the fall. We’ll find out after Labor Day.