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The network news chiefs insist nothing so drastic is being contemplated just yet. Though pummeled by competition from cable, local news and the Internet, the evening-news programs still have an important function. They are the flagship broadcasts for the network news divisions, they showcase well-paid and highly respected news stars, and they still make money. Though their ratings have dropped steadily, the decline has been less steep than the slippage in network viewership overall. In the latest Nielsen ratings, ABC's World News Tonight (ranking second behind NBC's Nightly News) was watched by 7.5% of the nation's TV households. An average hour of ABC's prime-time schedule was seen by just 6.8%. "A significant number of Americans are watching [the nightly news]," says NBC News president Andrew Lack, "and millions would be disappointed if it weren't there." Says CBS News president Andrew Heyward: "I see prime-time news as a supplement to the evening-news program, not a substitute."
Still, few people these days are home in time to catch the network evening news. These viewers are now being served by cable channels like MSNBC (with Brian Williams' 9 p.m. newscast) and CNN (which is about to introduce a four-night-a-week magazine show, airing at 10 p.m., in conjunction with Time Inc. magazines). Local stations in many markets have done well with newscasts opposite the last hour of network prime-time fare. In Europe and Canada, national TV newscasts have run in prime time for years.
Shortly after becoming ABC News president in 1977, Roone Arledge proposed that the network's struggling evening newscast be switched to 10:30. (The idea didn't fly, and Arledge created Nightline instead.) Former NBC News president Lawrence Grossman recalls that in 1990, after leaving NBC, he suggested to CBS chairman Laurence Tisch that the network should move its evening news to 10 o'clock, where it would get a bigger audience. (Tisch listened, but nothing came of it.) "There has to be some change in the structure we now have," says former CBS News president Van Gordon Sauter, "where three evening-news shows are Xerox copies of one another in a dwindling market. Someone will see a chance to break out first and make a big score."
To understand the current boom in prime-time news, it helps to go back to a notorious truck fire in November 1992. That was when Dateline NBC aired a segment in which an explosion was rigged to show the alleged safety problems in some General Motors trucks. It was an embarrassing black eye for the new program, but it prompted NBC to bring in a fresh executive producer, Neal Shapiro, who put the show on a winning road. Dateline spun stories off the day's news more often than its rivals (particularly on high-impact tabloid stories like O.J. Simpson and JonBenet Ramsey); had a looser, more viewer-friendly format, with regular features like Pauley's Timeline quizzes; and kept filling weak spots in NBC's schedule. This season three of Dateline's four weekly hours have often ranked among the Nielsen Top 20, and the show is reaching the youngest audience of any network newsmagazine.