Dual anchors, not dueling

When ABC News President David Westin wanted to tell Elizabeth Vargas and Bob Woodruff that he had selected them to lead the network’s flagship broadcast late last week, he had trouble getting his two new anchors in the same room.

Woodruff had returned from a reporting stint in Mississippi just as Vargas left for a trip to cover the storm recovery efforts in New Orleans. Westin ended up breaking the news via conference call.

There’s no guarantee that the two anchors -- who are social friends but rarely worked together in their nine years at ABC -- will be spending more time together once they officially take the helm of “World News Tonight” on Jan. 3.

In a sign of how the role of the network anchor is evolving, executive producer Jon Banner said Tuesday he planned to make the most of the benefits of an anchor duo by frequently dispatching one to the field, something that was harder to do when Peter Jennings was the sole face of the broadcast.

“We’re not going to travel for travel’s sake, but this gives us more flexibility than before,” Banner said. “It gives us the ability to highlight certain stories that we might not send an anchor to if we only had one.”

In fact, when ABC settled on the pair as Jennings’ successors, network officials had never even seen them sitting side by side behind the anchor desk. While Vargas and Woodruff frequently served as substitute hosts of the evening newscast, they had not done so together in the studio -- and the network didn’t even bother taping a test broadcast to study what such a show would look like.

So when the two joined each other Monday in the lobby of the news division’s fifth-floor executive offices to field questions about their new assignment, it was a rare moment.

“We’ve both been, in the last several months, very much two ships passing in the night, communicating via e-mail, and I expect that to continue,” Vargas said, adding with a laugh: “Well, Bob, it’s been nice seeing you.”

Both expressed some relief at the format, which will allow them to keep a foot in reporting even as they anchor, especially since ABC has asked them to lead versions of the broadcast for the Web and West Coast viewers.

“What’s good for the viewers is good for us personally,” Woodruff said Monday. “One of the fears that Peter expressed to me over the years was that once you get to this chair, once you get to this position, you’re not able to go out to the big stories and the things you’ve always loved your whole life as a journalist to do.”

Neither of the new anchors is a household name like Charles Gibson, the “Good Morning America” co-host who was also a contender for the evening news post. In separate interviews Tuesday, they discussed the distinct paths that led them to the top jobs in broadcast journalism -- he through his experience as a field reporter and foreign correspondent and she through her years of anchoring and work on prime-time feature stories.

Vargas, 43, was born in Patterson, N.J., but spent most of her childhood growing up on U.S. bases in Germany and Japan as her father, an Army officer, was transferred to new assignments.

The family never watched television, but Vargas developed a bug for journalism in Germany, when her teacher named her editor of the Heidelberg High School student newspaper. She planned to study newspaper reporting at the University of Missouri in Columbia but got hooked on television after taking a mandatory course.

Her first gig came while was still in school and was hired to be the Saturday anchor for the local ABC affiliate, which was owned by the university. She was paid $3.35 an hour and waited tables to make ends meet.

After graduation, Vargas did the local news circuit -- Reno, Phoenix (where the news director told her she’d make “a lousy anchor”) and Chicago -- before she was drafted by NBC in 1993. She worked there for three years, doing pieces for the prime-time newsmagazines and serving as a substitute anchor on “Today.”

ABC tapped her in 1996. After a stint as the news anchor on “Good Morning America,” she worked as a correspondent and anchor for “20/20” and a substitute and weekend anchor for the evening news.

Woodruff, 44, followed a decidedly different route. The native of the Detroit suburb of Birmingham ended up in law school at the University of Michigan, where he also studied Chinese because “I thought China was the future.”

After one year as a corporate lawyer in New York, he took a leave of absence to move to Beijing to teach law. During the Tiananmen Square uprising, CBS hired him to work as a translator, and he began to rethink his career choice.

“I discovered that I could scratch my wanderlust itch and get paid for it, which was a remarkable revelation,” he said.

Upon his return to the U.S., he made an amateur test reel and sent it out to news directors, unsolicited. A station in Redding, Calif., called. After less than a year there, he was hired in the early 1990s at affiliates in Richmond, Va., and Phoenix, before ABC asked him to join its affiliate service. A posting at the Justice Department followed, then ABC’s London bureau, where Woodruff spent two years traveling, mostly covering U.S. actions in Afghanistan and Iraq.

“They are both journalists first and anchors second,” Banner said. “But they did come up in different ways and I think that forms their editorial center of gravity.”

The two new anchors, who both joined ABC in 1996, never shared an assignment. But for the last four or five years, Vargas and her husband, singer-songwriter Marc Cohn -- best known for his 1991 hit “Walking in Memphis” -- have regularly gone out with Woodruff and his wife, Lee, a freelance writer.

“We have riotously fun dinners together,” Vargas said. “Even at the big ABC holiday parties, the four of us still end up in the corner together.”

Both are parents -- Vargas has a son who turns 3 in January, while Woodruff has four children, ages 5 to 14 -- and admit to some apprehension about the time their new posts will take away from their families.

“There’s some trepidation about how we’re going to juggle everything,” said Vargas, who leaves Saturday for a 10-day trip to Iraq. “But there are millions of working mothers in this country, and if they can do it, so can I.”