NEW TELEVISION SEASON: THE TIMES THEY ARE A-CHANGING : With Independent Stations, Cable Services Producing More Shows and Affiliates Bypassing Networks With New Technology, TV Today Is a Marketplace of Options : SATELLITES HELP GATHER LOCAL NEWS

As the new TV season begins this month, so do the renewed ratings battles of CBS, NBC and ABC newscasts. But this may be what one ABC executive calls “a landmark season” for the nightly news programs of networks and their local affiliates alike.

The reason: Affiliates now have in place SNG, or satellite news-gathering operations that their networks have created--and partly financed--in response to pressure from affiliates. The idea is to give local stations the ability to cross city and state boundaries for stories.

News-via-satellite from local reporters sent to other states, other regions and even other countries has been gradually increasing over the last few years. But now, with the network-aided news cooperatives able to link local stations from coast to coast, some students of TV news say that those and other satellite ventures, including Cable News Network, portend the demise of the nightly network TV newscasts that have been with us since 1948 and CBS’ “Douglas Edwards and the News.”

As you’d expect, network news executives emphatically say no.

Some change is inevitable, they acknowledge, but say their newscasts will survive because networks still have the greatest resources--human and technical--to cover major national and international stories on a daily basis and provide the greatest in-depth reporting and perspective.

There are those who disagree, of course.

“That’s a lot of baloney,” snorts Stanley S. Hubbard, owner of ABC affiliate KSTP-TV in St. Paul, Minn., and outspoken founder of Minneapolis-based Conus Communications, a 2-year-old satellite consortium of 45 network-affiliated and independent stations.

His observation has nothing to do with the depth of reportage or perspective accorded major stories. He contends, among other things, that networks can’t react fast enough on major breaking stories, that they can’t offer a daily 24-hours-a-day news service.

“I’m not going to tell you they’ve had it, because they haven’t had it,” he says. Still, he adds, “if things go on as they are now, I would guess that in less than 10 years” network newscasts may be on the way out, with local stations replacing them with their own programs of local, regional, national and international news.

But he is in the minority, judging from interviews with various industry observers and local broadcast news executives who, like Hubbard, gathered last month in Salt Lake City for the annual convention of the Radio-Television News Directors Assn.

John Spain, of ABC affiliate WBRZ in Baton Rouge, La., and a former association president, says he has heard on “quite a number of occasions” that nightly network newscasts are in their waning days. But “I don’t believe that’s going to happen,” he says.

“I do see a change,” he notes, referring both to news formats and to the fact that network newscasts even now are leaving their New York studios more frequently, their anchors and staffs jetting to a major story and airing their programs via satellite.

In the future, he says, networks “may give us ways of splitting up half hours--15 minutes for them, 15 minutes for us,” or may offer news with--or without--an anchor.

With satellites, though, “there’s no question that local broadcasters are going to use that same technology to cover the news in Washington, or on a major story in the United States and perhaps bypass those historical network feeds,” he says.

However, he adds, “I personally think the network news operations are very much alive and well. They still deliver one heck of a good product.”

That product, superior journalism, is what networks “have got to exploit” for their newscasts to remain in business, says retired CBS News executive Burton Benjamin. He cites as an example a recent look by CBS’ Bruce Morton at potential 1988 presidential candidates.

That kind of story “takes more than having a cameraman and a satellite dish to bounce it from. That requires a journalist,” says Burton, an executive producer of the “CBS Evening News” in the era of Walter Cronkite.

“It requires a guy who can write, a guy who knows how to put tape together, a guy who is sophisticated about politics. That’s where their (networks’) strength is--in the quality of their reporting.”

But satellite technology of local and network news operations, the ability to beam live and taped stories back from distant locales, “is going to be a draw” as its cost comes down, he notes. “You once paid $75 for a pocket calculator. Now you pay six bucks. That’s what’s happening with all this equipment, the dishes and the trucks.”

He referred to the costly array of satellite gear at the news directors’ convention, where a record 165 exhibitors displayed their various wares (including a computer system with the memorable name of “BIAS NewsRoom”). That high-tech companies are eagerly responding to satellite-minded local news directors was indicated by the number of exhibits promoting portable “fly-away” satellite dishes, satellite trucks and the sale of satellite transponder time.

In 1984, there only was one satellite display, says Eddie Barker, the convention’s exhibits manager. “This year, there were 14.” And this year, he adds, station engineers and managers showed up in force for the first time to see and try the new technology.

Much of the interest stems from the networks’ satellite operations for affiliates, such as CBS’ NewsNet and ABC’s NewsOne cooperatives. Each divides the nation into six regions, each region with its own mini-network. But each system also gives a station in one state the ability to get a story fed from another station across the country.

NBC’s system, called Skycom, doesn’t use regional divisions, but simply provides station-to-station links on request.

CBS’ system began in Texas in May, 1984, followed in April the next year by ABC’s version, with NBC’s operation firing up this year, network officials say.

Far from signaling the demise of network newscasts, “it makes our job a lot easier,” says Tom Bettag, executive producer of the “CBS Evening News.” He was discussing the CBS’ affiliates’ satellite system but sounded a common network refrain.

“What it does is free us to do more thoughtful reporting,” to go more into the significance and implications of major stories, he said by telephone from New York last week.

With all three systems now fully operational as the new TV season begins, “it is a landmark season and I think it’s going to be very beneficial overall” for viewers, affiliates and networks, ABC News Executive Vice President David Burke says.

Burke, also interviewed by telephone from New York, said the impact of the new systems on nightly network newscasts won’t be sudden, but rather will evolve slowly:

“You may find national news organizations doing a lot more foreign stuff, or two-ways (discussions of a story between an anchor and a correspondent) or more analysis on the assumption that strong local broadcasts have already brought you the headlines.”

In creating satellite news services for their 600-plus affiliates, he says, the three networks are responding to several kinds of pressure--including the fact that good ratings for local evening newscasts often greatly determine those of the networks.

Another factor: Some affiliates, impatient to use the new technology to expand their boundaries and raise their ratings, were starting to put together their own regional networks for exchanges of stories.

“So that was a pressure the networks really wished to respond to,” Burke says. “Because a network by its very definition is a network, and it wishes to retain the attributes of one. If the networks weren’t going to do it (create regional networks for affiliates), there were organizations out there that were quite willing to, like Conus.”

Finally, he says, the networks’ satellite services, in addition to satisfying affiliates, also provide the networks with “a great deal more information and material that we otherwise wouldn’t have had.”

Not all local news directors are satisfied with the mini-networks. Jim Bennett of CBS affiliate WINK-TV in Ft. Myers, Fla., believes that CBS News gets more stories and benefits more from its Southeastern regional network than the affiliates it serves.

But Bennett, who began as a newspaperman, worked as a KNBC-TV reporter in Los Angeles and was a correspondent in Vietnam for both NBC and ABC, has a satellite news alternative, as do a number of other network affiliates. In his case, it’s an eight-city satellite cooperative to which his station belongs, in addition to CBS’ Southeast network.

The Florida News Network offers him more in the way of state-interest stories and gives him more flexibility in covering them, he says, and “that’s why I prize it so highly.”

He recalls that CBS executives, citing a big selling point for its regional service, “told me that ‘if you join this network, you’ll be tied in all over the country (with the service’s five other regions) and have access to 36,000 stories a year.’

“I ask you,” Bennett says with a sigh, “what . . . am I going to do with 36,000 stories a year?”

Despite his complaints, he doesn’t think the nightly network newscasts are doomed. Yes, he says, affiliates in major markets could maintain bureaus in other cities and other countries and produce their own versions of network newscasts. “But I think they would find it extremely costly, and not very cost-effective, either . . . so I don’t think satellite newsgathering is really going to put the networks out of business unless that’s the way they want it to be.”

Former CBS executive Benjamin, now working as senior fellow at the Gannett Center for Media Studies at Columbia University, says the key to the future of network newscasts lies in the quality of their journalism.

In many cases, he says, local stations will have aired the day’s major story and pictures before they air the “CBS Evening News,” “NBC Nightly News” or ABC’s “World News Tonight,” “and the audience sitting at home knows about that story.

“But if it’s a good story, viewers want to know more about it. And the network can give them more about it through the quality of its reporting.”

However, he warns, if the networks start making their evening newscasts “a magazine, or if they start going soft (loading up with light features), then I think they’re probably sounding their own death knell.”