Donaldson Leads the E-Way : Veteran TV anchor takes a chance on the Internet with a 3-day-a-week program aimed at folks at work.

Poor Sam. He’s got this problem and--considering that he’s the star of “samdonaldson@abcnews.com“--it is certainly a perversely ironic one.

Try as he might, Sam Donaldson can’t figure out how to get his own Web show on his home computer. So his son and a friend are coming over to fix it one of these days.

Make no mistake, though. Donaldson is unperturbed by this setback. Did Lewis and Clark turn back at the Rockies? Did Columbus tremble before the wide Atlantic? A latter-day e-explorer, Donaldson considers this the merest of potholes on the information autobahn, upon which he is hurtling at full throttle.

“I love it,” Donaldson says of his thrice-weekly Web show, the most unusual twist in his long and distinguished career. “As long as David Westin [ABC News president] wants to pay me this big, inflated salary to basically do ‘This Week’ and the Internet show, I’m all for it.”

Like many people who come late to the Internet, Donaldson has embraced it with all the fervor of an Elmer Gantry. “I see a great future” for the show, he says, “and, I’m speaking very selfishly, for me.”

He must deal with the present, though, and it is both tantalizing and frustrating. Two months after its late September debut, “samdonaldson@abcnews.com” remains network TV’s only regularly scheduled Web show. But like any Internet pioneer, “sd”--carried live Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays at 9:30 a.m. PST--must grapple with glitches.

And what gloriously aggravating glitches they are. Foremost, people must load RealPlayer onto their computers before watching the show, which is composed of interviews, polls and breaking news. But this can trigger a migraine. Some office computers, for example, are rigged to prevent downloads of putatively entertainment-related software. Other machines simply refuse it the way a picky eater might shun a plate of okra.

The next hurdles are bandwidth and modem speed. So-called “streaming video” requires generous amounts of both, and “sd” gives users a choice of modem speeds (28.8 kilobits per second and higher). At slower speeds--still common on most PC modems--”sd” becomes a viewing experience that can best be described as comical. Donaldson and the interview subjects move in jerky slow motion, and sound follows a heartbeat later. Sometimes Net congestion interferes with the transmission, and when this happens, the picture freezes and an insistent noise--not unlike a woodpecker banging away on a tree trunk--emerges from the speakers.

The verdict: “sd” has more bugs than a Florida swamp. Bernard Gershon, vice president and general manager of abcnews.com, says, “Is this something that everyone with Internet access can access easily and have the best possible experience? No. It’s not.”

OK, it’s vastly easier to sit back, punch the remote control and watch Donaldson, or a hundred other hosts, anchors or reporters on television. But that would miss the point, if you believe the other Elmer Gantries at abcnews.com: the future.

And they may be right. “How is the patient going? Well, your question poses the idea that the patient is ill, which I take issue with,” says Howard Rosenberg, a veteran network investigative producer (and no relation to the L.A. Times television critic of the same name), who runs “sd” and appears occasionally on the show.

“It’s more like, ‘How are things in the new maternity ward?’ We’re just taking baby steps on the edge of the technology, and you know how fast the baby grows,” Rosenberg says. “Turn around and we’ll all be grown up.”

Glitches aside, growing pains loom. Many industry observers believe that such Web programming could one day supplement, or even supplant, over-the-air broadcasting. That, naturally, terrifies network affiliates, which may be one reason “samdonaldson@abcnews.com” is the only show of its kind.

But Gershon insists that “sd” is not a stalking horse for an Internet-only TV future but simply a way to bring people to abcnews.com, not an easy task in the crowded world of on-line news.

“Long term, we’re going to be trying all kinds of ways of using new and existing content,” he says. “It really depends on what the users say.”

So far, ratings are hard to pin down. An early October interview with Jesse Ventura scored an estimated 400,000 hits. Most shows get a fraction of that. Gershon says 9:30 a.m. PST was picked “because we wanted to target the at-work users. There are a lot of people working in offices who don’t have good access to radio, but they do have PCs with fairly high-band connectivity.”

Interview subjects are an eclectic lot: Donna Rice, author of a recent book on how to avoid Internet porn; historian Robert Dallek; ABC sitcom star D.L. Hughley; Bob Young, founder of technology firm Red Hat; and Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos.

Meanwhile, Donaldson insists that he is ecstatic. He left a full-time role at “20/20” last summer, disappointed by the show’s increasingly frothy content and lack of interest in his bread-and-butter political coverage. His “sd” gives him freedom--particularly freedom of style. Intrepid viewers of “sd” see a relaxed, witty, off-the-cuff Donaldson. This is not a show overly burdened by seriousness.

“If people say, ‘Where is he? I used to remember him,’ at my stage in life, I don’t care. I’ve got the cows [at his ranch] in New Mexico. So for me it’s not a gamble. If people say Westin has brilliantly maneuvered me into a dead end, then he’s done it so smoothly I don’t recognize it. If I thought they were putting me out to pasture, I’d be bucking and whining. . . .

“If people say, ‘Whatever happened to. . ?’ well, I’m going to come back! They’ll say, ‘What’s that giant ugly figure rising from the mist?’ It’s me!”