‘USA Today TV’ Sets Different Direction

Jim Bellows, who was once brought in to revive “Entertainment Tonight” when critics were complaining that it was all form and no content, said Wednesday that his focus will be much the same with his new patient, “USA Today: The Television Show.”

No format changes are planned for the 4 1/2-week-old magazine series, said Bellows, who was hired Tuesday as its managing editor.

“No, I’ll just try to get the news content more exciting, more interesting and compelling,” he said in a brief phone interview from the show’s headquarters in Rosslyn, Va.

When it premiered Sept. 12, “USA Today: The Television Show” was calling itself TV of the future: Awash with graphics, quick stories, quicker polls and factoids, it was the ultimate in high-tech TV for the young, video-fluent generation.

It didn’t work, however. The premiere was thoroughly roasted by critics, assailed as all flash and no content, and the ratings fell below expectations. Its whiz-bang pace soon was slowed, and the program was made what executive producer Steve Friedman calls “a little more traditional.”

The half-hour show is syndicated weekdays to 156 stations, including KCBS-TV Channel 2 in Los Angeles, and is produced by GTG Entertainment, the company owned by Gannett Co. and former NBC Chairman Grant Tinker.

Facing the all-important November ratings sweeps, Friedman and other executives of GTG decided on another change: With Bellows, they’re going back to the past in hopes of ensuring the show’s future.

Bellows is 65. He is not video-fluent. He spent most of his career in newspapers, leaving only in 1981 to run the then-new “Entertainment Tonight,” where he remained until 1983.

“It was my idea to hire him,” said Friedman, who will remain as executive producer but will relinquish day-to-day editorial control to Bellows. “I was looking for someone who had both TV and newspaper experience. He was perfect. He also had the right kind of TV experience.”

Bellows comes with the reputation of having straightened out “Entertainment Tonight” in its wobbly early days by giving it a harder news edge and a sense of direction.

He faces a similar task with “USA Today,” which spent $40 million starting up, and whose lack of Nielsen success thus far has inspired several would-be competitors to knock on station doors offering replacements. The potential rivals include “Inside Edition” and Geraldo Rivera’s “The Investigators.”

Nevertheless, Friedman and other spokesmen for “USA Today” steadfastly insist that their show has no intention of throwing in the towel.

“I’ve certainly always felt--in my own background--that it’s a lot easier to fix something than to start something up,” Bellows said. “I think I can help this work.”

He will be helping on a part-time basis this month, as he finishes his current job in White Plains, N.Y., as director of editorial development at Prodigy, a home computer service owned by IBM and Sears.

He went there in 1986 after three years with ABC News, during which time he developed a pilot for a news series called “Seven Days”--”it’s still on the shelf,” he said--and was executive editor of “World News Tonight.”

Until he joined “Entertainment Tonight,” Bellows’ world had been print, not electrons. Besides a tour as associate editor of the Los Angeles Times, he had been the editor of the New York Herald Tribune, the Washington Star (both now deceased) and the Los Angeles Herald Examiner.

Nothing as a newspaperman had prepared him for “ET,” he said: “It was quite a new world because they (reporters), at the time, would go out on assignment and say, ‘What color do you like?’ ”

The “one saving feature” during his period of adjustment, he said, was a staffer on the show, Bob Flick, a veteran of both UPI and the news department at KNBC-TV Channel 4 in Los Angeles. Flick, who is still with “Entertainment Tonight,” showed him the ropes and “was extremely helpful,” Bellows said.

The changes Bellows made at that show? “I was just trying to get down to the basics of covering news and making things exciting,” making the show more timely and seeking “better questions, better writing,” he said.

He dodged questions on what he considered still wrong with “USA Today,” and on whether he thought the critics’ boos had been justified.

“I just think that you can make a very exciting new show that is somewhere half way between ‘Entertainment Tonight’ and Brokaw, Jennings and Rather,” he said. “And that there is a place where you have to give the news a special dimension and an edge.”

That’s what he plans to do, he said.

And of the rap that “USA Today” has been all form, little content?

“Well, I’ve heard that about (ABC News president) Roone Arledge’s shows and ‘Entertainment Tonight’ too,” he said. “All I know is that I’m going to worry over the content. . . .”