Moyers, Ellerbee Upcoming

“USA Today” and “Monitor World” aren’t the only national programs by former network newsies with a Sept. 12 premiere date. Public television’s Bill Moyers, who left CBS News in 1986, also has one bowing then.

It’s “Bill Moyers’ World of Ideas,” a 10-week series of half-hour interviews to be aired each weeknight.

It will feature, Moyers says, “people of ideas and vision and insight not normally heard” during election-year campaign seasons. The lead-off witness: film maker David Puttnam, former head of Columbia Studios.

Linda Ellerbee is another network news graduate (ABC and NBC) with something afoot in September. But not for TV. It’s a once-a-week column for the Hearst newspaper syndicate.

In January, though, the former co-anchor of “Our World” and “NBC News Overnight” is scheduled to return to TV--in a new late-night, syndicated, sort-of-news series, “And So It Goes.”

“I don’t know how to describe it easily,” she said by telephone from New Orleans, where she was doing commentary on the GOP national convention for Cable News Network.

“It’s a picture show, a video scrapbook kind of show. It’s quirky news pieces, show-off editing and shooting--like news videos cut to music.”

It also will have “home videos” contributed by celebrities to whom the show loans a camera. Ellerbee says she already has one video by “Doonesbury” cartoonist Gary Trudeau and his wife, “Today” co-anchor Jane Pauley.

The half-hour series, airing five nights a week, will require considerable editing time and material. Can Ellerbee keep it going? “Certainly not,” she explains. “I intend to leave town after the first week.”