ABC Plans Assault on ’60 Minutes’ Dominance : News: No format, reporters or anchors have been set, but the network wants to air a serious newsmagazine by autumn.

ABC will challenge CBS’ powerhouse “60 Minutes” with a Sunday-night newsmagazine of its own by the start of the fall season, network executives said Friday.

“We are definitely going ahead with the show,” Joanna Bistany, a vice president at ABC News, said in an interview. “Hopefully, we will be on the air before the fall--we’d like to try the program out in the summer. But we will be on by the fall.”

The executive producer of the new program will be Tom Yellin, who has been the executive producer of Peter Jennings’ ABC documentaries and is a former senior producer on both CBS’ now defunct “West 57th” and ABC’s “Nightline.”

No format, reporters or anchors have been set for the program, which will air at 7 p.m. Sundays against “60 Minutes,” which, in its 24th season, is the most popular series on television. The on-air talent is likely to be younger than the stars of “60 Minutes,” but ABC executives emphasized that the show will be a serious, story-driven program, not a high-concept “news lite” alternative to CBS.

“They have bigger stars and an extremely loyal following,” Yellin said in an interview, “but we can compete with them in terms of going after serious, interesting stories. How we will be different from them is the next question we will be asking ourselves. We haven’t decided that yet. But our emphasis will be on substance, not style. We’re not going to be doing a lot of profiles of aging rock stars, and I’ve yet to have a meeting on graphics for the show.”

Bistany said that ABC had no expectation of immediately knocking “60 Minutes” off its ratings throne.

“The great success of ’60 Minutes’ tells you that there is an appetite at that hour for a good informational program,” she said. “The choice is to let them have the field all to themselves or to offer an alternative. If we don’t go up against them, they’ll go on unchallenged in perpetuity. At this point, they could probably go to black and still get a rating that would beat half the shows on TV. The network’s commitment to this show is for the long haul.”

There was no word from ABC executives as to what will happen to “Life Goes On,” the family drama currently occupying the Sunday-night slot against “60 Minutes.”