ABC News Picks Duo for New Format

ABC named Elizabeth Vargas and Bob Woodruff as the new co-anchors of “World News Tonight” on Monday, charging the duo with the task of expanding the reach of the evening broadcast by delivering more real-time news.

When they officially take over Jan. 3, the pair -- who succeed the late anchor Peter Jennings -- will helm four separate editions of the evening newscast, including an online version and two feeds customized for West Coast viewers. The new format, which will require an additional financial commitment by the network, reflects the effect of a rapidly changing media landscape in which news is instantly available on the Internet.

“What we are trying to do in this is revolutionary,” said executive producer Jon Banner, who added that the show might offer a different lead story for West Coast viewers, depending on the news of the day. “Our audience on the West Coast has had to put up with decades of stale news, and we intend to change that.”

In picking Vargas, the co-anchor of “20/20,” and Woodruff, the Saturday anchor of “World News Tonight,” ABC executives passed over Charles Gibson, the 62-year-old ABC newsman who many assumed would take over after Jennings’ death from lung cancer in August.

ABC News President David Westin declined to discuss why he selected two lesser-known anchors over the veteran broadcaster, but said he wanted to choose newscasters who could lead the program for another generation. Vargas, who is 43, and Woodruff, who is 44, are close to the age Jennings was when he took over in 1983.

“They bring a curiosity and a dedication and enthusiasm for what needs to be done,” Westin said at a news conference Monday afternoon at ABC’s Manhattan headquarters. “My clear goal through all of this was to make sure that we had a structure for the future.”

Westin, who said he made the decision in consultation with Walt Disney Co. Chief Executive Bob Iger and Anne Sweeney, president of the Disney-ABC Television Group, said he opted for two anchors because it was “simply too big a job.”

At one point, Westin considered having a three-person anchor team that included Gibson, but negotiations broke down over the length of time he would be part of the newscast, according to a senior network executive who did not want to be identified discussing internal matters. Gibson wanted to work on “World News Tonight” for three years, through the 2008 presidential election, but Westin wanted to give him only a two-year commitment, the executive said.

ABC executives would have also run a risk in removing Gibson from his current assignment as co-anchor of “Good Morning America,” which produces a large share of the network’s profit. (So far this year, “Good Morning America” has generated more than $495 million in ad revenue, whereas “World News Tonight” has pulled in $162 million, according to Nielsen Monitor-Plus.)

And with NBC’s Katie Couric considering leaving “Today” for the “CBS Evening News,” ABC could have an opening to take on the top-rated morning show.

An ABC spokeswoman said Gibson had no comment. Westin praised him as “selfless,” noting that Gibson frequently pulled double shifts to fill in on the evening news after Jennings’ illness. The ABC News president said that after the anchor died, Gibson told him, “I will be perfectly happy whichever way this goes.”

The Vargas-Woodruff pairing will be the first anchor duo on an evening newscast since the mid-1990s, when CBS briefly paired Dan Rather and Connie Chung in an ill-fated experiment. Vargas and Woodruff appear to have better chemistry.

Woodruff said that his wife and four children were close to Vargas and her husband, singer Marc Cohn, who have a 2-year-old son.

Both came to ABC in 1996 but took very different paths. Vargas, who started off in local news, worked as a correspondent for NBC’s “Dateline” and “Today” for three years before being tapped by ABC, where she has most recently anchored the prime-time magazine show “20/20,” a post she will continue to hold.

Woodruff, a former attorney, got his start in television news in 1989 when he was teaching law in Beijing. During the Tiananmen Square uprising, CBS News hired him to work as a translator, after which he worked in local news before ABC hired him to work for its affiliate service. He was then tapped to cover the Justice Department and later worked as a foreign correspondent for two years.

Under the new model, Vargas and Woodruff will anchor three versions of the broadcast -- one at 6:30 p.m. Eastern time for viewers on the East Coast and in the Midwest, one at 8:30 p.m. Eastern time for West Coast cities such as Sacramento, Las Vegas and Fresno that show the network news at 5:30 p.m. locally, and one at 9:30 p.m. Eastern time for other West Coast cities.

Although all three networks already update their newscasts when news breaks, Banner said that the various editions would allow ABC to do so more frequently and tailor the West Coast broadcasts with regional stories about local wildfires or immigration, for example.

Vargas and Woodruff also will produce a live daily webcast previewing the evening news. In addition, the network plans to post unaired portions of interviews and blog entries. In some ways, ABC is playing catch-up with NBC and CBS, which already offer their own Web features.

The selection of the new anchors may not significantly alter the current dynamics of the evening news competition, as Woodruff and Vargas have been splitting “World News Tonight” duties through the fall. Since mid-September, the ABC newscast has attracted an average of 8.5 million viewers a night; first-place “NBC Nightly News” has pulled in an average audience of 9.6 million viewers, according to Nielsen Media Research.