A TEST OF THE COALITION

Everywhere you looked on NBC News last week, you saw Moscow correspondent Dana Lewis, traveling with Afghan rebels. While Lewis held forth on “NBC Nightly News With Tom Brokaw,” MSNBC, the morning “Today” show and an online MSNBC.com diary, MSNBC anchor Ashleigh Banfield popped up from Pakistan on CNBC. Hoda Kotbe, normally a correspondent on NBC’s newsmagazine “Dateline,” anchored MSNBC, as did Maurice DuBois, a reporter from NBC’s local New York station. An MSNBC report about rescue dogs turned up, shortened, on “NBC Nightly News”; Tom Brokaw’s interview with the senior President Bush aired on “Nightly News,” “Today” and MSNBC.

The Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and America’s response promises to be one of the most significant stories that modern-era television news has covered, and it is bringing into sharp relief the different economic models by which the business operates today. For NBC, it will be the first real test of the company’s bet on the future of the medium: three different NBC-owned networks--NBC, MSNBC, CNBC---sharing staff and stories, giving each incrementally more resources than it would have alone, but mostly ensuring that costs are amortized across numerous outlets.

For any network, this story--with numerous tentacles in diplomatic, economic and domestic arenas--will be a challenge. Much of it will take place on far-away soil. It requires expertise in foreign affairs that old-hand television anchors such as Peter Jennings still possess but newer hires have largely never had the chance to cultivate. It will potentially be long and costly to cover, and much of it may not have dramatic pictures.

In five years on the air, MSNBC, which is co-owned by Microsoft Corp. and in non-crisis times relies on biographical profiles to fill its air, has lagged sharply in the ratings behind leader CNN and Fox News Channel (although NBC says it is quite happy with MSNBC’s younger, upscale audience). If NBC is able to rise to the occasion this time, its success may make another broadcast/cable network combination inevitable.

Already, some media observers say, the story has amplified CNN’s strength--an extensive worldwide presence. At the same time, for perspective and depth, viewers are turning to the broadcast networks. Last week, CNN was hinting to ABC News and CBS News that it wanted to renew talks about a possible newsgathering combination; those earlier discussions bogged down over issues of control.

In the spartan MSNBC operation here across the Hudson River from Manhattan, two weeks into the crisis, the mood seems remarkably business-as-usual. At President Erik Sorenson’s morning staff meeting, he gives orders to start sending people home earlier in the evening. “There’s a cost issue,” he says, and besides, if war starts, staffers will be working long hours again. But he also wants them to report live at times such as 1 a.m. so the West Coast has up-to-date news.

Competitors ABC News and CNN had to hire back staffers laid off in earlier cutbacks to cover the heavy crisis workload. For NBC employees, the schedule is no less intense for a different reason: There is so much time to fill. “It’s a 24-hour, seven-day-a-week operation. People are used to it,” said David Verdi, executive director of newsgathering. “We’re five years into this, and we’re in it for the long haul.”

The network too has found ways to adapt: When a correspondent needs a few hours to sleep, programs clamoring for live reports are told to find a guest expert instead. But with two correspondents in Afghanistan and three in Pakistan, the network is rarely without someone to talk. On the day the New York Stock Exchange reopened, both MSNBC and “Today” used CNBC reporters for expertise.

“To be able to turn to reporters whose beat this is, for perspective, is enormously valuable,” says anchor Forrest Sawyer, who was at ABC during the Gulf War. “The organization would be deeply strained if it weren’t.”

At Sorenson’s meeting, no matter who is speaking, all eyes keep flitting to the bank of TV sets on the wall, showing MSNBC, CNBC, NBC and Fox (but no CNN).

Talk first turns to long, taped pieces that are getting lost in the computer system and not airing. NBC News President Neal Shapiro believes those pieces are setting MSNBC apart from CNN and Fox: “Sometimes, while everyone else is just talking and interviewing, you want to take a step back and get some in-depth knowledge.” But there is so much information being beamed into the MSNBC hub that the challenge is to keep track of it, and then make sense of it. A board on the newsroom wall lists the day’s live press conferences and speeches; there is something at least every half-hour. Another board lists every correspondent’s whereabouts, and still another divides producers into teams by the subject to which they have been assigned, including “the money trail” and “recovery efforts.” Three employees huddle at a computer to work out the next day’s themes.

“The difficulty is that the information comes in so quickly that we have to really, really focus to turn it around and make it into television,” says Ramon Escobar, executive producer, dayside programming. Escobar tells Sorenson’s staff meeting that the day will have two themes: the money behind suspected terror mastermind Osama bin Laden and the geopolitics of Pakistan and Afghanistan. “We need to drill down on that,” he says repeatedly.

Before Sept. 11, Escobar says, he knew “not very much” about Afghanistan. “I knew what the average journalist in this building probably knew, a little bit about the Soviet invasion. That it had been poor country for a long time.” And some basic facts about the Taliban. So he followed the cable model: Experts were enlisted and paired with producers to give everyone a crash course in the topic. “We’re all still trying to educate ourselves on this,” he says.

At the morning meeting, Escobar discusses the new relief map of the region, a custom job that is magnetized and can be drawn upon with felt-tip markers by analysts. A second map is on the way. Model planes have been hauled out. Sorenson tells his staff that in this “lull between the bang-bang of the 11th and the inevitable next rounds of bang-bang ... we need to bring about as much understanding as possible.”

But there’s also a branding push: Anchors must constantly stress NBC’s international presence, he says, and tell viewers anytime NBC gets correspondents into a new location.

ABC and NBC each say they have about 60 staffers positioned throughout the region surrounding Afghanistan; CNN says it has 75; and CBS reports it has about 30. (Fox is partnering with the U.K.’s Sky News.) They are there reporting on rebel troop movements and the streams of refugees at the borders, but mainly, they wait for the bombs they expect will be dropped. While they wait, NBC can use its reporters throughout the day; CBS and ABC just for the few hours each day devoted to news.

“If I didn’t have MSNBC, I probably wouldn’t have as many people; I would be holding back,” says Verdi. “Every dollar I spend in the field, I get twice as much for my money. When you compete on a 24-hour basis, you have to go after it all,” he says. “It’s better for the network because we’re in places we might not be.”

The ease with which the control room communicates with correspondents in the field is spooky. Flip a switch, and Tom Aspell gets word in his ear that it is time for a report via satellite videophone from an on-the-move Afghan rebel camp. It’s a huge advance over the Gulf War, when live reports came from fixed satellite uplink locations. Any field reports then were couriered out, on videotape, usually on military transports. Now, a minute before he is due, Aspell wanders into the picture and soon goes on the air, giving viewers a lengthy, nuanced history and geography lesson.

The connective tissue between the NBC operations proved invaluable on Sept. 15 after NBC’s Manhattan studios lost power in the midst of Brokaw’s newscast. Brian Williams, anchor of MSNBC’s evening newscast, picked up where Brokaw left off, and the two operations later worked together on a three-hour “Dateline” special.

But the one-vision, many-networks system hasn’t been totally seamless. Shapiro had the idea for all NBC News programs to have a theme of bio-terrorism on Tuesday. But though “Today,” “Nightly News,” “Dateline” and WNBC followed along, the topic was scarcely to be found on MSNBC, which had dealt with the topic on a previous day. Shapiro says the theme days are a way to make stories “stand out” in the information overload and plans to have a couple of NBC News-wide themes every week, which will include MSNBC’s participation this time.

MSNBC provides another kind of safety net, says Shapiro, by giving the main NBC network time to look before it leaps. “If the network needs to take a minute or two to think what we are going to do, I know that MSNBC has us covered.”

MSNBC’s coverage had an additional benefit: In the first days of the crisis, more than 100 NBC stations across the country picked up parts of it, yielding an additional 5.3 million viewers on average. But overall, the network is still third in the cable news race, drawing an average 906,000 viewers the week of Sept. 17, to CNN’s 1.7 million and Fox’s 1.1 million. Still, MSNBC has had some of its highest audience shares in the last few weeks, and says it has seen its audience drop off less from the first week to the second than its rivals.

Sorenson says CNN has “a huge brand advantage” that in times of crisis draws viewers who don’t normally watch cable news. But MSNBC, he says, “has access to better people and better-known people. That gives us a huge competitive advantage in the context of this terrible story.”

Like other news operations, Sorenson and his team are grappling with how long the audience will remain interested. “All of us in the media would rather spend our time reporting consequential politics and news than celebrity affairs and political-sexual affairs,” he says. But he notes that after one horrific bombing in Israel last summer, the minute-by-minute ratings showed that “the audience went away after two hours.”

But he would be disappointed, he says, “if the audience levels for this story didn’t stay very high. You would hope that there would be heightened interest, awareness and desire to know more about the world we live in.”