How's Barbara Doing?

Barbara Walters' mission in moving to ABC was to pull the network out of last place in the evening news sweepstakes. In two months on the job, she has delivered 300 news items, conducted 17 on-air interviews, and smiled bravely through 38 of Co-Anchorman Harry Reasoner's sign-off witticisms. The result: ABC is still last and, in fact, further behind the leader, CBS.

In the nervous, numbers-obsessed world of television programming, there are two gauges of success: Nielsen ratings, which measure popularity in percentages of all TV-owning households, and audience shares, which express the preferences of only those households with sets turned on. By the second standard, ABC is not exactly burning up the air waves. Its most recent weekly audience share was 18, the same as the average share for the month before Walters arrived. For CBS, however, the share has risen from 29 to 30. NBC's share has dropped from 25 to 24.

ABC officials prefer to compare the average Nielsen figure for Barbara's first seven weeks on the job, 10.5, with the program's average rating for the same period a year ago, 9.9--which translates into a gain of more than 700,000 viewers. But again, CBS has done better, rising from 13.9 to 15.7. NBC's rating is virtually unchanged.

Less Room for News. The numbers are causing some concern at ABC. "We rise or fall on shares," says one veteran Washington correspondent. "If we can't get the share up, things will really hit the fan." Harry Reasoner shows some disappointment. "I wish the ratings were higher," he says, "and I hope they will be."

The fault apparently is not in the star--who has fluffed nary a line, bantered easily with Reasoner, and put even more bite into her interviews than she did on NBC's Today show--but in her format. ABC's half-hour newscast was restyled to include Walters' interviews, unscripted dialogue and features on such self-help topics as health, psychology and personal finance. As a result, there has been less room for news. Reports from correspondents in the field, for instance, dropped to 140 in the first month of Walters' tenure, from 168 the month before. ABC had been planning to alleviate the space problem by expanding the program to 45 minutes or an hour, but the network's affiliate stations killed that idea a month ago. Barbara's bosses are now de-emphasizing the self-help features and reorganizing their correspondents. They are even trying to lure heavyweight reporters from rival networks (one target: NBC's Tom Pettit). Says Walters: "We've got a long climb ahead of us."

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