Networks Expanding Newsmagazine Racks : Television: ABC adding ‘Day One’ to schedule; CBS and NBC are developing more prime-time shows.

In late February or early March, ABC plans to introduce a new prime-time newsmagazine, called “Day One,” with Forrest Sawyer as the anchor.

The new magazine, which will air on Sunday nights at 8 p.m., will be the third ABC News magazine in the network’s prime-time schedule, joining “20/20” and “PrimeTime Live.”

In June, CBS sources say, the network plans to introduce a new prime-time newsmagazine that is being developed for Connie Chung. As yet untitled, it will feature five correspondents, including Bernard Goldberg and Edie Magnus.

It will be the fourth CBS News magazine show in the network’s prime-time schedule, joining “48 Hours,” “Street Stories” and the Daddy Warbucks of newsmagazines, “60 Minutes,” which, after 24 seasons on the air, has earned a whopping $1 billion in profit for the network and currently outranks “Roseanne” as the season’s top-rated series.

NBC executives, eyeing the growing ratings for “Dateline,” their newsmagazine with Jane Pauley and Stone Phillips, are developing another entry into the newsmagazine sweepstakes. And the Fox network, which is building a news division under former CBS News president Van Gordon Sauter, has made the development of a newsmagazine a priority.

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Some observers question whether the proliferation of newsmagazines eventually will result in a kind of “reality” overkill for viewers, with newsmagazines going the way of doctor shows, lawyer shows or other past fads in entertainment programming. For now, though, what is driving the newsmagazine engine is a combustible combination of relatively low budgets and high ratings.

“When the networks began putting on a number of new newsmagazines several years ago, the economics of the shows was a key force in their gaining slots in the prime-time schedules,” said Andrew Heyward, executive producer of “48 Hours,” the Dan Rather-anchored CBS magazine that premiered in 1988, and will be the executive producer of the Chung show. “The conventional wisdom was that, in a time slot where the network was likely to be second or third to the competition, a newsmagazine (currently costing about $500,000 per hour, half the budget of an entertainment show) was attractive programming. What’s interesting about the current TV season is that not only are these shows financially attractive to the networks, they’re among the highest-rated shows in prime time.”

Among the 115 series that have aired on the four networks this season, “60 Minutes” ranks No. 1, “20/20” is No. 17, “48 Hours” is No. 25 and “PrimeTime Live” is No. 28, with the newer “Dateline” and “Street Stories” at No. 43 and No. 48. The shows are practically ranked according to their number of years on television.

“20/20”--whose mix of investigative pieces, consumer-advocacy and profiles is privately acknowledged by TV executives to be more imitatable in the new crop of newsmagazines than the big-ticket, long-running stars of “60 Minutes”--premiered in 1978 and for many years was the sole successful sister act to “60 Minutes.”

“PrimeTime Live,” which premiered in 1989, has gone through several transformations, including finding a niche of undercover, “hidden-camera” journalism, promoting Diane Sawyer as the star anchor and eliminating the “live” element altogether.

“Entertainment shows usually have a finite life span and, with some exceptions, they tend to be either hits or they’re canceled,” said Joanna Bistany, ABC News vice president. “What we’ve learned with newsmagazines is that they take time to build and grow. It’s possible that this trend will peak. But if the talent, format and stories are right, a newsmagazine can renew itself because reality is compelling and, at least in theory, you can never run out of stories.”

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Originally planned as a David vs. Goliath alternative to “60 Minutes,” ABC’s “Day One,” which takes its name from Sunday being the first day of the week, now will air after “60 Minutes.” According to executive producer Tom Yellin, it “will aim to succeed on substantive stories, the way ’60 Minutes’ has,” with reporting by correspondents including Sheila MacVicar, former National Public Radio reporter John Hockenberry and Michel McQueen, a former political reporter for the Wall Street Journal.

Yellin, whose credits include being executive producer of Peter Jennings’ hour-long documentaries on ABC, said that, in creating a new newsmagazine, he and his producers are “obviously, creating a variation on a theme, not a new theme entirely. The challenge is to create a program that is different from other newsmagazines already on the air while not ignoring the lessons learned by successful newsmagazines already on the show.”

Unlike many recent newsmagazines, “Day One,” Yellin said, will not have a female and a male anchor and three stories, with one of those often being a hard-edged piece and one intended to be heartwarming.

“We’ll try to have more of a fit between pieces, long and short, with reporting and analysis that may question authority,” he said. “We are not intending this to be some kind of hipper ’60 Minutes,’ but, in planning the show, we’ve been thinking, ‘How would you do ’60 Minutes’ if you were creating it in 1993?’ ”

Whether the current popularity of newsmagazines has to do with their being “zapper-friendly” or a sign of more serious times creating an appetite for news presented in an entertaining way, it’s not easy to create a successful one.

“I’m proud of the fact that we were No. 1 last week--with a 42 share--on a program that didn’t do anything about the Amy Fisher story,” said Don Hewitt, the creator and executive producer of “60 Minutes.”