TV Is Welcomed to the Paper Route : ‘USA Today,’ Christian Science Monitor Show Join the Fray

Steve Friedman was in New Orleans last week, kibitzing with pals from his network days as they covered the GOP convention. John Hart was in Boston, practicing a program.

But each was thinking of Sept. 12.

On that day, each will be involved with new half-hour weeknight TV programs, with Hart anchoring the Christian Science Monitor’s “World Monitor” and Friedman producing “USA Today: The Television Show.”

Each is a megabucks effort bankrolled by a major newspaper corporation, the Friedman venture by the Gannett Co.--publisher of USA Today--in a co-production deal with former NBC Chairman Grant Tinker.

And while both efforts have been called news programs, neither will be a traditional type of newscast. One might be called an issuecast with a global view, the other a featurecast focusing on the United States.

Friedman’s syndicated show, sold to 160 stations, falls in the latter category.

Rife with state-of-the-art graphics, it will offer four segments--Front Page, Sports, Life and Money--and basically will be a video version of the breezy, short-item USA Today newspaper.

The show will be “fast-paced, colorful” and usually will start each night “with the most interesting section,” says Friedman, who left NBC News last year after seven years as executive producer of top-rated “Today.”

If a sample shown TV writers in April is any example, “USA Today” will be the kind of show that dares poll the nation--as did a Life segment--on such matters as whether love and marriage still go together like a horse and carriage.

The “Monitor” program is somewhat more cosmic. Airing only on cable TV’s Discovery Channel, it is what a Discovery spokeswoman calls “a news-inspired global report on issues affecting humanity.”

Hart, a former “CBS Morning News” anchor who went on to spend 13 years at NBC News before quitting in April, says several minutes will be devoted in each broadcast to the day’s headlines.

But each broadcast, he adds, usually will start with a “thematic piece” that seeks to put into context and explain the issues and relevance of a major story--or stories--of the day.

Also planned, he says, is “an analytical and reportage section” in which he discusses given issues with the program’s three senior correspondents in London, Tokyo and Washington: Ned Tempko, Tashki Oka and Julia Malone, respectively.

“This will be a nightly feature and can include experts from anywhere around the world,” says Hart.

“Monitor,” like the newspaper company backing it, is based in Boston. “USA Today” will come from the Gannett headquarters building in Roslyn, Va., a Washington suburb.

The latter show, with estimated start-up costs of $40 million, has a staff of nearly 160, including segment anchors Edie Magnus, Kenneth Walker, Bill MacAtee and Robin Young, all network graduates.

It will have bureaus in New York, London, Chicago, and Culver City.

It isn’t known how long “USA Today”--there also will be a one-hour weekend version--will stay on the air if it doesn’t turn a profit. Most stations carrying it have signed two-year contracts, a spokesman says.

Hart’s program will have a staff of 100 worldwide and also be able to draw on the Christian Science Monitor’s 22 foreign and domestic bureaus, according to Annetta Robertson, an executive of the parent company.

“The Monitor has given us five years to break even, and committed $20 million a year to do so,” Hart says. “That may sound like a modest budget, and it is. But the commitment is five years.”

(Network news budgets averaged about $275 million each last year.)

“Monitor World” will be fed to the Discovery Channel at 4 p.m. PDT each day and repeated--with updates if necessary--at 10 p.m.

The cable service says it is seen in 33.8 million homes. That works out to 38% of the nation’s households with TV.

Stations airing Friedman’s “USA Today” will get it via satellite each weekday at 1:30 p.m. PDT with an update three hours later for West Coast stations, if needed.

According to a spokesman for the show, all but one of the 160 stations that plan to carry it is a network affiliate. The exception is a Gannett-owned Boston station.

About 80% of the stations that have bought “USA Today,” says the spokesman, plan to air it in the time period for which it is intended--somewhere between 6 and 8 p.m.

Some TV writers have seen the new entry as a rival to network evening newscasts. Not so, producer Friedman keeps saying.

His show, he says, primarily was created to offer an alternative to syndicated--and highly profitable--game shows and sitcom reruns that local stations air in the early evening hours.

“Most of television is counterprogramming,” he says. “If everybody’s got game shows and sitcoms, maybe there’s room for this kind of thing.”

Maybe. But earlier this month, he learned that one station in New York, the nation’s largest TV market, had no room in the key early evening hours.

CBS-owned KCBS-TV in Los Angeles is among stations planning to air “USA Today” at 7 weeknights.

On Aug. 5, CBS-owned WCBS-TV in New York surprised the people at “USA Today” by scheduling the show at 2:05 a.m.

The move came as the station finally emulated a step taken by KCBS two years ago: It said it is shifting Dan Rather’s “CBS Evening News” from 7 to 6:30 effective Sept. 5.

Some had thought “USA Today” would get the vacated 7 p.m. slot. Wrong. A syndicated game show, “Win, Lose or Draw,” got the nod. WCBS officials, who had viewed two pilots of Friedman’s show, decline to discuss why it was consigned to the night-owl brigade.

“I was surprised,” Friedman says of the station’s action. “But I wasn’t in shock. . . . They program the station. It’s not my job.” The show had been bought sight-unseen in February.

No, he adds, “I’m not going to say, ‘Gee, (the station’s decision) didn’t have any effect.’ Sure, I was disappointed. But life goes on.”

He sees a bright side: “They want the show. They kept the show.” And they may still later change their minds, he says.

And if not? Well, he says, under terms of Tinker-Gannett’s deal with the station, if the show isn’t in a pre-prime-time slot by January, “we get to pull it from them and sell it to somebody else.”

At least one observer with a rival show doesn’t think that step will be necessary.

“Steve’s a friend, and I expect him to succeed,” says “World Monitor” anchor Hart. The WCBS setback “will be temporary. Once they see how successful he is, I think they may want to put him down in the (early evening) schedule.”