Start spreading the news: ABC focuses on West Coast

If you’ve tuned into ABC’s “World News Tonight” on the West Coast in recent days, you’ve seen some stories that viewers in the rest of the country didn’t get in their broadcasts.

Last Thursday, it was a piece on California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s state of the state address. The next day, there was an account of Google’s announcement of its new video and software offerings at the Consumer Electronics Trade Show in Las Vegas. On Monday, it was a segment on Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour’s plans for rebuilding that state, laid out in his first post-Hurricane Katrina speech.

These stories all broke too late to make the traditional 6:30 p.m. Eastern time broadcast, which airs live on the East Coast and in the Midwest. But ABC got them on the air because last week, a few days after the new anchor team of Elizabeth Vargas and Bob Woodruff officially took the helm of “World News Tonight,” the network began doing something different -- broadcasting live to the West Coast every night.

The new initiative represents a substantial investment by ABC: the hiring of at least a half dozen more people to staff two new live newscasts, one at 8:30 p.m. ET and one at 9:30 p.m. ET, in order to meet the various time slots in local markets. The network has also launched a daily live 3 p.m. ET webcast, in which Vargas and Woodruff preview the stories that will lead the broadcast. (ABC officials said the moves have incurred “significant costs,” but declined to specify how much.)

This “expanded version” of the evening news, as network executives call it, marks ABC’s most dramatic effort to date to keep up in an era of increasingly customized news.

“For far too long we have been ignoring a large segment of our audience and they really deserve and demand, in a very competitive environment, the most up-to-date news,” said Jon Banner, executive producer of “World News Tonight.” “We were sort of cheating our West Coast viewers into accepting the same news that was played three hours earlier.”

The Western editions of “World News Tonight” not only will allow ABC to offer viewers the latest on developing news stories, Banner said, but also will give the network an opportunity to highlight regional stories such as immigration and wildfires that do not always make the original broadcast.

To promote the effort, Vargas and Woodruff are scheduled to anchor “World News Tonight” from various cities on the West Coast late next week, including Los Angeles.

Early ratings reports indicate that ABC got a bump in some Western cities during the first few days of its late edition. In Las Vegas, the audience increased by 23% on Thursday and Friday compared to the last quarter of 2005, according to Nielsen Media Research, and Phoenix was up 17%. The audience in Los Angeles stayed flat, however, and Seattle saw a 27% drop. (Nationally, second-place ABC continued to lag more than a million viewers behind the top-rated “NBC Nightly News.”)

It remains to be seen whether ABC’s labors to remake its evening broadcast will have a substantial effect on viewers in the long term. Radio and television ads promoting the new Western editions tacitly acknowledge that the network may be selling something television watchers didn’t realize they needed.

“Did you even know your network evening news wasn’t live?” an announcer asks in one radio spot. “Well, that’s finally changing.”

Judy Muller, a former ABC correspondent who now teaches journalism at USC, said that the effort will be embraced by West Coast affiliates, who have long been frustrated with the New York-produced newscasts that often include local stories that are old by the time they air. But she cautioned that tailoring a customized West Coast edition of the evening news could undercut the notion of a national newscast, in which all viewers are exposed to the same information.

“I think there’s a real fear that someday we’ll end up with an Amazon.com version of news, in which your name will come up, and it will say, ‘We think you’d be interested in these stories,’ ” she said. “The danger in that is that there are many stories that we all need to know about.”

The idea of a Western newscast is not entirely new. Back in 1979, CBS launched a West Coast version of the “CBS Evening News” that ended at some point in the 1980s. Rival networks are quick to point out that nowadays they too broadcast live to the West Coast -- when the news merits.

“They have not reinvented the wheel here,” said Rome Hartman, executive producer of the “CBS Evening News,” who noted that last week CBS updated its West Coast feeds with developing news about the West Virginia mine accident story. “When there’s news that breaks on a clock after the East Coast feed of the evening news, we’re going to cover it.”

In fact, with news available practically instantaneously online -- and increasingly on devices such as cellphones -- the traditional broadcast networks are pursuing several strategies to deliver fresh content. CBS and NBC have substantially beefed up their Internet offerings with free video and Web-only stories -- a step ABC is taking as well. And NBC uses its sister cable network, MSNBC, to leverage resources for network coverage.

“We have a very healthy West Coast strategy,” said NBC News President Steve Capus. “Having a 24-hour, seven-day-a-week news channel uniquely positions NBC to be able to do breaking news all the time.”

Therese Gamba, vice president of programming and station marketing for KGO-TV, the ABC affiliate in San Francisco, said that although it is too early to gauge the effect the Western edition of the newscast will have on viewership, station officials welcome the network’s move.

“We’re thrilled,” she said. “We think it’s good for the station and it’s good for the market, therefore it’s good for the viewers.”

Woodruff, who anchored the weekend edition of “World News Tonight” before he and Vargas were tapped last month to replace the late anchor Peter Jennings, said that until ABC began the Western edition, the broadcast was updated only when the situation was urgent.

“There’s a lot that happens after 6:30,” he said. “Those were nervous days when we didn’t have a West Coast edition, because we didn’t have the anchor of the broadcast still around in the studio, and there was always this possibility that something significant could change in the broadcast you just put out. Now, the threshold for us is very, very low for updating, because we are there.”

Banner acknowledged that ABC will not update or substitute stories for the later broadcasts every evening; on some nights, Vargas and Woodruff will merely introduce the same segments that aired earlier. But he argued that ABC’s approach makes it more proactive than its competitors.

“I think what we now realize, after spending just a couple of days looking at this, is that there are increasingly things we can do to make that broadcast more up-to-date,” Banner said.

The new initiative comes at a considerable price, however. Producers are planning to set up a rotation to staff the later broadcasts, but for now, much of the staff has been working from about 8:30 in the morning until after 10 every night. (Another cost of the Western edition: delivering dinner to the newsroom every night, a step the network began on Thursday with a taco buffet.)

And it’s already made for a wearying pace for the new anchors. Woodruff -- who anchored the show from Tehran and Jerusalem last week -- had to stay up until 4:30 a.m. Friday morning in Israel to deliver a live report about the health of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon for Thursday’s Western edition. He passed the time drinking tea at a Jerusalem restaurant.

Although network officials have said that both anchors will appear on all the broadcasts, Woodruff suggested that it may not be feasible for him and Vargas -- who each have young children -- to regularly work until 10 every night.

“What’s going to happen, I think almost certainly, is that we will work out some kind of schedule where we’re both not going to have to be here every single night and never see our children and never see our families,” he said. “I think that would be recipe for burnout.”