NEWSCAST IN OVERDRIVE

By Richard Zoglin

NBC anchorman Tom Brokaw was one of the three most uncomfortable men in America last Tuesday night. Like his counterparts at ABC and CBS, he had to vamp on the air as two bizarrely incompatible events prepared to collide: President Clinton's State of the Union speech and a verdict in the O.J. Simpson civil trial. In Brokaw's earpiece, frantic conversations were taking place between NBC News executives in New York City and the producer on duty in Washington, with Brokaw chiming in whenever he got a few seconds off the air. "It was an American cultural meltdown," he says. "There were no rules you could turn to." Yet there was, in the end, no real debate on what to do: NBC, like its two network competitors, stuck with Clinton's speech.

The decision, in retrospect, was a no-brainer--made easier for NBC by the fact that it had two sister cable channels, MSNBC and CNBC, continuing the O.J. stakeout in Santa Monica, California. But the decision had particular resonance for NBC. The network's evening newscast has faced similar--if less momentous--choices night after night for the past several months, and has come down, more often than not, on the opposite side: bypassing or downplaying traditional Washington stories in favor of news, trends and features from the heartland--plus a liberal dose of O.J. The strategy has worked: the NBC Nightly News has been No. 1 in the ratings for six straight weeks (with one tie), inching ahead of the longtime leader, ABC's World News Tonight.

The success can be attributed partly to a spillover from NBC's ratings dominance in prime time, as well as to the resurgence of its news division generally. After a long, embarrassing string of failed magazine shows, the network has created a successful, three-nights-a-week franchise in Dateline NBC, which provides a valuable promotional platform for the Nightly News. The weekday Today show and Sunday's Meet the Press are No. 1 in their respective leagues. NBC has also expanded more aggressively into cable, the Internet and overseas broadcasting than has any of its network rivals.

But winning the nightly-news race may be NBC's most impressive feat yet. The combined audience for the Big Three evening newscasts has declined steadily over the past 15 years, nibbled at by a horde of competing news sources on cable, local TV and elsewhere. Older viewers who do tune in to network news, moreover, are notoriously slow to change their habits. The CBS Evening News was No. 1 for all of the 1970s and most of the '80s. In 1989 ABC's World News Tonight took over the top spot and held on to it for years. The broadcasts have been anchored by the same three middle-aged white males for more than a decade.

But under the guidance of news president Andrew Lack (a former documentary and magazine-show producer at CBS News who took over NBC's news division in 1993), the NBC Nightly News has had a remarkable makeover: fewer stories per night, moving the broadcast closer to a magazine-show approach; less traditional news from Washington and more on user-friendly topics like health, the family and consumer issues; and a jazzier format, with lots of catchy labels for continuing segments. The "Fleecing of America" is the umbrella title for stories on government waste and taxpayer ripoffs. "In Their Own Words" gives newsmakers a chance to talk uninterrupted for a minute or more. "NBC News on Line" is, well, a hip title for what seems to be nothing more than a brief look at other stories. (Yet another continuing segment debuts this week: "The Family," exploring subjects like divorce and fatherhood.) Brokaw now stands, rather than sits, in front of a very '90s video wall. And at the end of the show, his face--presto!--appears on a huge video screen overlooking New York City's Times Square.

It's a triumph of packaging, but does the NBC Nightly News still deliver the nightly news? It depends on what kind of news you're looking for. According to the Tyndall Report, a newsletter that monitors the three evening newscasts, NBC spent more time last year than either ABC or CBS on such high-impact stories as the ValuJet crash and the Simpson trial and far less on Bob Dole's campaign and the Whitewater investigation. In foreign news, the numbers were especially striking: NBC spent only 49 minutes all year on the strife in Bosnia, in contrast to 117 on ABC and 134 on CBS. NBC stories are more likely to go for the gut and the pop-cultural hot button. A report last week on daydreams (part of a mushy weeklong series called "Sleepless in America") illustrated its thesis with clips from the movie Wayne's World. On another recent newscast, the second story of the night was a blatantly tearjerking excerpt--"In Their Own Words"--from the press conference of the mother of a teenage girl slain on the same day as Ennis Cosby.

NBC News executives fervently defend their show against charges that it has gone soft and tabloid. "Don't make us the antichrist," joked Brokaw, relaxing in a black cardigan sweater last Monday afternoon in his Rockefeller Center office. It was a slow news day, and with nothing of substance coming out of the National Governors' Association conference, the program was planning to lead, once again, with the Simpson trial. "We're not happy about it," said Brokaw. "You don't have a lot of people here saying, 'Let's do O.J.'" Indeed, while NBC went overboard with Simpson coverage during his criminal trial, it has been considerably more restrained during the civil proceedings.

"The mission of the program remains identical," says Lack, who takes a hands-on role in the Nightly News, consulting on each day's story lineup. "That is to bring the best execution journalistically of the most important news of the day. I don't think our program is better than World News Tonight or the CBS Evening News with Dan Rather. But we've made a conscious effort to produce a somewhat different program from the ones they do." It's a more "populist" approach, he concedes, which eschews Washington "process" stories--subcommittee hearings, presidential speeches--in favor of "the real news in people's lives."

Brokaw objects to judging the broadcast by the numbers. NBC did fewer stories from last year's Republican National Convention, he acknowledges, but it went around the country instead, "taking the themes of the day and looking at their impact on people." Asserts Brokaw: "Washington has become disconnected from the rest of the nation. There are profound changes going on in this country. We have to stay relevant to people." And entertain them too. Says executive producer David Doss, a former producer of ABC's PrimeTime Live: "Who says the news has to be boring to watch?"

Network rivals can't afford not to take notice. ABC News executives gripe that NBC has copied many of their ideas: ABC's "Your Money, Your Choice" has become NBC's "Fleecing of America"; "Person of the Week" has transmuted into NBC's "The American Dream." But ABC has returned the favor by launching a new, NBC-style segment called "Solutions," an anecdotal look at good-news solutions to problems, like a story on "relationship-based" day care. "They've been very clever about packaging their show," says ABC News executive vice president Paul Friedman. "And that pays dividends. Good for them."

The CBS evening news has stuck closest to the old-fashioned, sober-minded approach. A Bob Simon report three weeks ago on crime, unemployment and housing problems in South Africa looked like an antique--informative, gracefully written and of virtually no relevance to soccer moms in Atlanta. Executive producer Jeffrey Fager vows to stay on the high road, "covering the day's news with the most substance, the most depth, the best writing in the business." But CBS too seems to be jumping more aggressively on the high-profile crime and disaster stories; it devoted the most time of all three networks, for example, to the crash of TWA Flight 800.

The success of NBC's new approach has pointed up the problem facing every news organization: how to attract an audience that seems less and less interested in news and yet, at the same time, is bombarded with it from a multitude of reputable and disreputable sources. The mantra among network executives is that the evening news must find a way of standing out in this crowd, offering something viewers can't get elsewhere. Yet if that were really the goal, the nightly news would be steering away from O.J. and JonBenet Ramsey (the very stories that are covered ad nauseam on every local newscast and magazine show in creation) and doing more on budget negotiations and the Middle East.

In fact, the real pressure is to follow the crowd and do news that sells, and NBC has carried that approach further than any other network. Brokaw pleads that the evening news' very survival is at stake. "I don't want to commit suicide," he says. Nor does anyone else. The question facing all three networks is whether NBC's form of life support is the only way to keep the patient alive.

--With reporting by William Tynan/New York

With reporting by William Tynan/New York