The Future of Evening News

There's an ironic twist to the story of recent Oscar contender "Good Night, and Good Luck." Based on real events, this Hollywood take on CBS News and its iconic journalists during the era of Joseph McCarthy was far more effective at drawing an audience and making money than the real CBS evening newscasts of today. The film, made for $7 million, has garnered more than $30

million in U.S. ticket sales so far. AtAmazon.com, it ranks among the top 10 most popular DVDs. Meanwhile, even as the "CBS Evening News" managed to attract more viewers last year, it remains mired in last place behind NBC and ABC. But the evening-news business has been steadily losing overall viewership. Still Leslie Moonves, CBS's CEO, is a happy-news kind of guy. "I'm not writing off the time period," he told NEWSWEEK. That's for sure. What he's writing are big checks, like the one last week for $75 million over five years for Katie Couric, the latest Great Anchor Hope in the television industry's eternal bid to reclaim the glory days of the evening news.

In "Good Night,'' the CBS founder Bill Paley, as played by Frank Langella, says of the TV news business: "People want entertainment, not a civics lesson." Though the film is set in the 1950s, the point is certainly true a half-century later. With the rise of two-income households and longer workdays, there are fewer traditional dinner hours in American households to provide a huge audience for the news. The combined evening-news audience for CBS, ABC and NBC (Fox Broadcasting doesn't offer network news) has plunged by half, to fewer than 30 million, from its 1969 peak. "The question is, can God save the evening news?" says chairman Jon Mandel of MediaCom, a top ad-service agency. "Just look at what time it's on." Lord knows network execs have tried, by toying with such innovations as coanchors, roving anchors and serial set changes. The result: more bad ratings and a geriatric audience coveted by big pharmaceutical companies but few others.

Until now, that is. News broadcasters lately are seeing the future. And guess what? It's not in the evening--and maybe not on the TV screen. Instead, broadcast journalism is going multiplatform. From iPods and cell phones to laptops, NBC, ABC and CBS are digitizing their high-priced anchors and correspondents to deliver news flashes by the byteful anywhere and any time to a mobile society. News-on-the-go is, of course, transforming all traditional media, from newspapers and magazines to radio. It's also a growing outlet even for the 24-hour cable news channels CNN, Fox and MSNBC, whose rise over the past quarter century helped fuel the decline of broadcast news.

The broadcast networks are hardly Web neophytes. They've long had their own established Net presence, and they've partnered with outside Web sites to supply news. In the 1990s, for instance, ABC forged a groundbreaking pact to be the exclusive supplier of television news to AOL. In 1999, CBS made headlines by supplanting ABC on the Internet giant. In the biggest partnership yet, NBC and Microsoft formed MSNBC.com a decade ago (NEWSWEEK is a partner). "When the venture began 10 years ago, who would have imagined that they would have grown so big?" says Steve Capus, NBC News president.

The widespread adoption of fast Net connections in homes and offices has set off an explosion of streaming and downloadable video news. CBS established CBS Digital Media, an umbrella broadband site that includes CBSnews.com. Moonves appointed an online news heavyweight to oversee it, Larry Kramer, founder of the Dow JonesMarketWatch financial news site, formerly CBS MarketWatch. NBC has put its entire evening newscast online.