NEW A.M. CO-ANCHORS LIKELY AT CBS

Forrest Sawyer and Maria Shriver, who in September became the latest co-anchor team of the struggling “CBS Morning News,” may be its latest former co-anchor team by this September.

CBS News wants them to stay in some capacity on the third-in-ratings program but probably won’t keep them on as co-anchors, a CBS source said Tuesday.

Their possible exit as anchors comes at a time when CBS is once again pondering new faces and another format change to make the program competitive with its rivals, NBC’s “Today” show and ABC’s “Good Morning America,” respectively No. 1 and No. 2 in the morning show ratings race.

This time, though, CBS sources said, the new look being considered for the “Morning News” could be a radical departure from the New York-based anchor teams all three network programs have traditionally fielded.

Such a new look was strongly hinted to CBS affiliates in May by Susan Winston, a former executive producer of “Good Morning America,” whom CBS hired to study and revamp its “Morning News” in the hope of finally getting it out of the Nielsen cellar.

At that time, she said that morning programs had become “clones of one another” with “old and trite formats” and that it was time for a whole new approach.

One approach said to be under consideration calls for co-anchoring to be done on a regional basis, with hosts not only in New York but in Los Angeles and several other major cities.

However, while the idea is getting serious scrutiny, “nothing is firm yet” and it is only “one of a half-dozen plans on the drawing board,” a source close to the program said.

The idea of more than one anchor in more than one city for a news program is not new.

Shortly after becoming ABC News president in 1977, Roone Arledge tried a three-anchor format for “World News Tonight,” with the co-anchors reporting from New York, Chicago and London.

It failed to boost ratings, and the program, now anchored by Peter Jennings, returned to the New York-anchor format used by all three network evening newscasts.

Still, should a multi-city anchoring tack be taken by “CBS Morning News,” two leading candidates for the New York portion are said to be Charles Osgood, a CBS News anchor and its unofficial poet, and Linda Ellerbee, formerly of NBC News.

Ellerbee, with NBC News nearly 11 years, left the network last week after rejecting its latest contract offer. But it isn’t certain that CBS News will be her next stop. The network has been talking to her, a source said, “but she hasn’t been offered a job.”

A CBS spokeswoman declined to comment about this and the possible exit of Sawyer and Shriver as co-anchors of the “Morning News.”

“Our position is that we will not comment on speculation,” she said.

The program’s planned new look is due by July 15. That’s the date Winston is scheduled to give CBS affiliates details of her plans to make the program more competitive.

Winston also said in her May speech to executives of CBS-affiliated stations that “by September, a new morning broadcast will be on the air,” but didn’t say whether the Sawyer-Shriver team would still be on it.

Sawyer succeeded Bill Kurtis when he left the program last summer. Shriver succeeded Phyllis George at the end of last August. George had co-anchored the program for only eight months.