‘Today’ Stays With the Times: On Top

When Barbara Walters started co-anchoring “Today” in the mid-1960s, she made union scale: “$750 per week, and I was thrilled.” As the NBC show, the original morning program, turns 50 years old on Monday, it’s a different world, one in which current co-anchor Katie Couric’s recent deal will pay her an estimated $16 million per year in what’s thought to be the largest deal ever for a news personality.

But from the perspective of Walters, now on ABC and one of the many news stars to emerge from “Today” over the years, what’s most fascinating is not what has changed but what hasn’t. Essentially, she says, “it’s been the same basic format for 50 years.” As former executive producer Steve Friedman puts it, “The bells and whistles are different, but it’s still the same train.”

There’s no longer a chimpanzee on the set (two chimps, J. Fred Muggs and Kokomo Jr., were frequently featured in 1953), and Couric hasn’t been forbidden by NBC’s president--as Walters was--from asking a question until her male co-anchor has asked three. (Walters co-anchored the show from 1964 to 1976, but got the title only when anchor Frank McGee died in 1974.) The weather girl is now a weatherman, Al Roker.

But the “Today” essentials remain the same: a mix of news and entertainment that fluctuates with events. It almost always starts with the story of the day and is designed to let viewers dip in and out, depending on whether they want to know about the collapse of energy trader Enron, Jack Black’s new movie “Orange County,” news anchor Ann Curry’s upcoming exclusive interview with former government scientist Wen Ho Lee or Monday’s nostalgic look at the show’s own history, complete with visits from many former “Today” personalities.

Anchors and reporters often travel overseas or to such events as preparations for the upcoming Salt Lake City Olympics to boost ratings. Even “Today’s” ground-floor studio has its roots in the past. Until the 1960s, the show broadcast at times from a Florida tourist office on the ground floor of New York City’s Rockefeller Center, where fans could look in the window and the resident parrot had cloth over his cage to keep him from annoying guests.

It’s a flexible, often-copied mix that has allowed the show to adapt over the years to periods of more and less news. And although it hasn’t much changed, the television environment around it has. As a result, “Today,” which began life to sharp questions about whether viewers would even tune in during the morning, is more relevant than ever. As Couric’s pay package illustrates, the show has in some ways surpassed the flagship nightly news in importance to the network.

As viewers have started getting up earlier in recent years, the show’s value has increased, primarily because morning news was the one element on a network schedule for which audience growth was possible, according to Joe Angotti, a former NBC News executive who teaches at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. Local stations added even earlier morning shows, which helped pump the network ratings and revenues: “Today” contributes more than $400 million in annual revenue to NBC. At the same time, the evening news audience for the three major networks, while still roughly double the morning audience, began shrinking, he says, as cable news drew viewers away and entertainment channels gave viewers more alternatives, such as movies and sports.

But although network television doesn’t have much of an advantage in the evening, because it must compete with all the other options, including the Internet, in the morning, “everybody has to wake up,” says Friedman, who was executive producer of “Today” and now oversees the rival CBS “Early Show.”

As a result, he says, the audience keeps growing. “Everybody thought that last year’s fourth quarter was the highest the three-network morning show audience would ever be,” because of interest in the disputed presidential election. But this year’s collective fourth-quarter audience, he notes, is 200,000 viewers higher than it was a year ago.

Recently, however, even as morning television has thrived, “Today” has faltered. Although it remains comfortably in first place, its fourth-quarter viewing is off 9% compared to a year ago; second-place “Good Morning America” is up 6%, CBS’ “Early Show” has jumped 14%, and CNN and Fox News Channel have also gained.

Speculation has centered on the show’s decision to approach the news somewhat differently from rivals, as post-Sept. 11 interest in news remains high, and on the routine growing pains as the staff settles in with a new executive producer after years as a finely tuned machine. It’s not the first time the show has had problems.

For its first 23 years, “Today” essentially had no competition, as CBS divvied up the time period with news and the kids’ show “Captain Kangaroo”; ABC, which, as the third network, had other problems to solve first, didn’t program the time period. Eventually, however, ABC’s “Good Morning America,” which launched in 1975, began to make inroads with a program heavier on entertainment and how-to service pieces and surpassed “Today” in the early ‘80s. (“Today” hired a consultant who suggested opening every show with news video, recalls Angotti, a practice that continues today.)

In 1990, a bungled transition from Jane Pauley to Deborah Norville tarnished the show’s luster for a time. (By contrast, CBS, which only went head to head in 1984, veered over the years from serious news to pure fluff, doing nothing very successfully, and only recently has gained with former “Today” anchor Bryant Gumbel and co-anchor Jane Clayson.)

But though ratings have fluctuated over the years, “Today” usually ends up on top, as it has been since 1995. “It’s the original brand, like Kleenex or Jell-O,” says Friedman. “Always, no matter what the crisis ... the ‘Today’ show bounces back.”

Medill’s Angotti attributes the “Today” longevity to the fact that the show “didn’t lose its focus on information.” And he says executives have been good over the years at hiring the right personalities, from original anchor Dave Garroway through Hugh Downs (later Walters’ co-anchor on ABC’s “20/20”), current “Nightly News” anchor Tom Brokaw and Couric’s co-anchor, Matt Lauer. Most, he said, maintained the tricky balance of being inviting and not too edgy while “not backing away from good interviews. It’s not an easy thing to do, to conduct a really tough interview and then come back and be light and happy and friendly.”

It is, as Walters says she recently told Couric over lunch, “still the best job on the air. You’re in touch with everything and you meet everybody. You do everything from interview the secretary of state to make pancakes and talk to Tom Cruise. If you can stand the hours, it’s the best job there is.”