COLUMN ONE : TV’s Tour Guides to the World : The anchors go where the pictures are. Networks are no longer the main news source, and the travel trend reflects their search for a reason to exist.

It is Monday, and Nelson R. Mandela is expected home tonight in Soweto, South Africa, for the first time in 26 years. Outside the house stands a familiar presence--anchorman Dan Rather, handsome as ever in a bone white safari jacket and blue jeans. Wasn’t he wearing an overcoat in Moscow two days ago?

Click. Tom Brokaw is there, too. He seems less posed than Dan, maybe because he’s wearing a blue suit. He does take off the tie, though, after the commercial.

Click. And there’s Ted Koppel, unflappable as he hosts a town meeting in Johannesburg, bringing together South Africans who officially do not speak to each other. He almost seems to function as a kind of global conflict mediator--didn’t he have some role in helping overthrow Philippine leader Ferdinand E. Marcos?

From Berlin to Malta to Prague to Johannesburg, the past year has brought a new twist to the idea that television will shrink the world into a global village: The village now has a tour guide, or narrator, like Thornton Wilder’s play “Our Town.” Increasingly, the central protagonist of the television culture, the anchorman, is part of the scene, walking us through the pictures--less an “anchor” and more a part of the video.

What is going on? Is all this rushing about a chase for ratings or another TV news fad, like blonde morning show hosts or spinning graphics?

The answer is no. The change really signifies the degree to which the role of nightly network news itself is in turmoil. Where once only the networks had footage of national and international events, today everyone has those pictures, and the networks have lost their function as a primary source of news. Sending the anchorman to the scene is really part of a tense network news search for a reason to exist at all.

What’s more, the wandering anchor reflects the extent to which, in the age of instant video, pictures themselves are the story, and the anchorman is less a storyteller working with words than a sort of companion for the viewer, supplying a sense of emotion and familiarity to the pictures.

“In the old days, he who had the news footage ruled the universe, and the only people who had it were the three networks,” said Lawrence Grossman, former president of NBC News. Now, “everybody has it--the locals, CNN--and it is the same stuff and they get it earlier, and the network news divisions are desperately looking for a reason for being.”

To compete, network news may increasingly treat subjects at greater length and try to be more interpretive and more international. If that happens, it will duplicate the change newspapers once went through in reaction to the advent of network news.

The roots of the networks’ current turmoil reach back to the early 1980s. The fledgling Cable News Network was gaining credibility as a news organization and looking for ways to generate more revenue. Its founder, Ted Turner, saw an opening: Why not sell CNN’s vast amounts of footage to the hundreds of local news operations around the country?

The networks had always jealously guarded their own footage, recognizing that exclusive coverage of the world’s biggest story each day was one of their key competitive advantages.

Turner had a different advantage. Viewers could turn to CNN as news was breaking. If the same footage then appeared on local stations a few hours later, it would only serve as a kind of advertisement for CNN. The cable operation, in turn, could get local footage from its subscribers, including some in other countries, which would provide it with international news.

News Footage Sold

Turner’s timing was superb. In the mid-1980s, dozens of new independent stations were being licensed, and they needed to establish news programs. At the same time, local stations began forming their own cooperatives to share footage, such as Conus Communications out of Minneapolis, and VisNews, offering coverage from overseas.

Network affiliates, caught in the middle, started pressuring the networks to respond. “Give us more of your footage from around the world,” they demanded, “to help us compete in our local markets.” The networks needed strong affiliates. And they were feeling increasing economic pressure themselves from the rise of cable. Selling their footage was a potential source of revenue.

In 1986 the networks typically fed affiliates a half-hour of footage a day. Today that is up to eight hours a day.

The change “revolutionized the business,” said Don Dunphy, ABC vice president for affiliate news service.

Local stations can air the same pictures as the networks, only earlier. To a large degree, the networks’ role as the nation’s primary headline service has been supplanted.

“What local television has is video flow,” said ABC anchorman Peter Jennings, and local stations do “a pretty good job of covering local news and a pretty good job of giving the national and international headlines.”

In fact, more people watch local news than watch the networks. And they watch more of it--almost twice as much each day.

Travel Experiment

Network officials began worrying about their role. Articles began appearing to announce the impending death of network news.

It was about this time that the networks began experimenting with travel.

“After you have watched an hour of local news, why would you watch another half hour of network?” said Tom Bettag, executive producer of CBS Nightly News. “There has to be something different.”

In 1985, all three networks decided to anchor from the U.S.-Soviet summit in Geneva. The next year they anchored from Manila for the Philippine elections. And by 1987, the anchors were traveling fairly often.

Usually, such trips were for domestic stories easily planned in advance--the State of the Union address or space shuttle launchings. Then in 1989 the expanding use of travel changed in an important way. The networks started rushing to the scene of breaking events, and increasingly--even before the opening in Eastern Europe--they went overseas.

The strategy had several advantages. For one thing, putting the anchor on the scene and into the shot makes the news proprietary, visually linking it to the network in the viewer’s mind.

The emphasis on international news is also part of the effort; in an era when local news consultants preach that audiences don’t like foreign news, the networks see a market niche that differentiates them:

“I think the American public is more interested in international news than most journalists think they are,” said Don Decesare, vice president for news coverage for CBS.

In effect, network officials concede, they are moving toward becoming supplements to the other forms of news.

“There are days that seeing something on local and cable and hearing it on radio sways me in the direction of not covering a story,” said Paul Friedman, the executive director of ABC’s World News Tonight. Instead, the networks “ought to be doing . . . more consistent examination of issues . . . and should give short shrift to . . . the hurricane, the avalanche here, the shooting on the street there.”

Where network news may well be headed, television executives say, is toward an even more abbreviated version of the basic news, with longer treatment on one or two subjects--the main story of the day or something more thematic.

In this format, the anchor might be on the road frequently, with a second anchor in New York handling the rest of the news.

If so, the change would respond to another evolution in television. Over the past few years, this has become a medium of pictures--not words.

Where once Walter Cronkite and Howard K. Smith described events and showed film footage that might be several days old, today CNN regularly airs videotape as soon as it comes in--pictures that are unedited, that even the CNN journalists have not seen, pictures without narration.

The change has been driven by technology with an almost Darwinian inevitability, as videotape replaced film, satellites replaced wires and satellite dishes became so portable they could be carried in suitcases. In a few years, video signals will probably be sent over phone lines, meaning that TV can be transmitted from anywhere.

The notion of “Film at 11” has become obsolete. Viewers can turn to TV news now to watch things as they happen, to experience events seemingly directly: a debate in Congress on C-Span, the President’s every public utterance on CNN, even the Romanian revolution seen live through the Romanian national television feed in network special reports.

The pictures tumble out so quickly the journalist cannot put the story together. He has no time to synthesize, or edit. The pictures are the story.

In this context, the anchor cannot stay home; he must chase the pictures. Traveling is not a gimmick. It is the networks’ way of trying to change a decades-old format to catch up to the new reality of television.

“The great power and impact and preeminent role of TV is that it brings you to the scene,” said former NBC boss Grossman. “It doesn’t think better or analyze better. . . . It is natural the main figure should be where the action is.”

In truth, this shift toward a more purely visual medium has changed the role of the anchorman as well.

That role in Cronkite’s day was to be a kind of omniscient storyteller, often for stories that had no pictures. But today, with viewers able to see so many events with their own eyes, the anchor has been transformed into a kind of traveling companion--”a page turner,” said Grossman, “a kind of validator” whose presence signals that a story is important and adds a sense of continuity.

The anchors also add non-visual elements to the picture--a sense of what it is like to be there. That is what Tom Brokaw was doing when he signed off one of his broadcasts in South Africa by talking about the many T-shirts with slogans he had seen in Soweto:

“The one I’ll remember best was on a young man listening to Mandela’s talk on education today. It read: ‘I Love My Country. I Just Hate Apartheid.’ ”

To a degree, the anchors are adding the appropriate emotion for the setting--a crucial ingredient in a medium that communicates pictures better than ideas.

Meandering Soliloquy

The same evening, for instance, Dan Rather ended his broadcast from a soccer stadium in Soweto. While 100,000 softly sang the black national anthem in the background, Rather offered a somewhat meandering soliloquy about the theory of “the end of history”--the notion that one idea, democracy, is triumphing worldwide.

His point was vague at best, but with the throng and the anthem in the background, the effect was strangely moving--the kind that makes you tingle.

Something else is going on here with the anchors as well, some critics point out. The network anchors are using events to market their newscasts, turning the news into a kind of continuing “photo opportunity.”

As Times’ television columnist Howard Rosenberg put it: Anchors are “more than just journalists, they’re also traveling salesmen . . . .”

Network officials concede the point. Decesare of CBS News said: “We want to build back a sense that existed during Vietnam--when this organization was identified by the people who covered the war--that CBS was the network you had to watch.”

But all news organizations--including the Los Angeles Times--use news for profit. The question is how they go about it.

Rather is often criticized for his style. Robert Lichter of the Center for Media and Public Affairs described him as “increasingly Nixonian” because his manner seems so studied it suggests an inner tension.

But the other network anchors also seem to approach their work at times as news celebrities, particularly when doing interviews. When Brokaw recently spent a day at the White House, NBC aired scenes of the President and Tom greeting each other like old friends.

Frankly, it is in the nature of television that the reporter and the story will blend. The sin, then, is not in being in the picture, but in becoming so noticeable that the news slips into the background.

TV critics have also complained that anchors devote too much time to stories they have traveled to and thus exaggerate the stories’ importance. “When the anchorman hits the road, his presence, not news judgment, determines the content of the show,” Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen wrote.

There appears to be some validity to this criticism as well. On Feb. 13, for instance, two of the three networks led the nightly news with second-day reports of Mandela’s freedom in South Africa, where they had their anchors. Only NBC led with the news that the World War II Allied powers had effectively agreed to German reunification, the story most of the world’s press ran as a front page banner headline.

In the larger context of what is occurring in television news, however, some experts actually think that overcovering an event on television may be more good than bad.

“The great untold story of media effects is that most people don’t listen to the news,” Lichter said. “What it takes to get their attention is a lot of coverage repeated in a lot of time.”

Perhaps the most important effect of the movable anchor, Lichter suggested, will be to accentuate the networks’ unique power to set the popular agenda, to tell Americans what issues generally they should be concerned about.

New York University professor Edwin Diamond even likens the anchormen on the move to heads of quasi-national states, setting the agenda for Americans at a time when the White House is not.

The idea of agenda-setting is not one network executives shy away from. “One of the things we think about is: Will this have an impact on the audience? . . . can we play this story big and by doing so make people pay attention?” said Decesare of CBS.

“I don’t see any down side to any of that,” said Friedman of ABC.

“If it gets six minutes of Nelson Mandela on the air instead of three, I am happy,” NYU professor Diamond said.

But travel can be expensive. It cost NBC more than $250,000 to send 27 people to South Africa, according to Don Brown, NBC’s executive news director. Although officials say that even figures of this magnitude are small in the scheme of network news budgets, traveling probably does mean the networks are unable to afford some other things--particularly in an era of increased network thrift. NBC, for instance, recently closed its Paris bureau.

And there have been travel excesses. ABC’s Peter Jennings now admits that the San Francisco earthquake was “an example of where we might best have served our audience by staying home.” All three networks “rushed off too fast” to the scene thinking the city was in flames. “I remember being in a helicopter the next day realizing that the fireball I had seen was just one fire in the Marina section of the city and feeling a little embarrassed,” Jennings said in an interview.

Another problem, network news executives admit, is that they feel great pressure to go to the scene if the competition is going.

“The question is asked: ‘Is so and so going?’ ” ABC’s Friedman said.

“It is a pretty asinine game,” his anchor, Jennings, said.

But perhaps a bigger danger is that the trend to travel, which networks hope will raise viewer awareness, will actually have a numbing effect.

“People who watch the news regularly will come to understand a story is not really that important any longer unless the anchor is present,” said Marvin Kalb, the former NBC diplomatic correspondent,

“You do have to be wary of that,” said Decesare of CBS.

But Kalb doubts the problem can be avoided. “I have a feeling that the networks are on a roller coaster that they will find it very difficult to get off.”

Still, at this point, it may be the only clear track the networks have left open.

NEWS GLUT--Television newscasts abound, but viewership is declining. F1