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ABC's Math: Comfort and Familiarity = Success

By Matthew Felling

May 17, 2007 / 11:07 AM EDT / CBS News

(CBS)

This morning, both the New York Times and the Washington Post took a look at Charlie Gibson's success over at ABC's "World News with Charles Gibson."

It boils down to this: In the wake of Peter Jenning's death in 2005, ABC News bypassed the tried and true options of "Good Morning America's" Diane Sawyer and/or Gibson as permanent anchors and went for the new and innovative team of Bob Woodruff and Elizabeth Vargas. Then fate stepped in, horrifically, and Bob Woodruff was seriously injured doing reporting from Iraq.

ABC News shifted on the fly, kept Elizabeth Vargas in the anchor's chair and matched her up with Gibson – asking him to do double-duty on "GMA" and "ABC World News" – as a stop-gap. Soon thereafter, Vargas announced she was pregnant and stepped down as co-anchor, and the anchor seat became Charlie, er, Charles Gibson's. And now he's on top of the ratings race, speeding past NBC's NASCAR aficionado Brian Williams to take the lead.

Not quite the way ABC drew it up the playbook. But in football and in network news, sometimes a broken play turns out just fine.

Theories for Gibson's success are scattered throughout the two pieces – it's his "reporting background" or the "stability" he provided ABC in tough times – but the two most salient passages in the coverage are this one halfway through the NYT piece:

Mr. Gibson, when asked if he had changed as a journalist over the last year, said he had grown more comfortable with the notion that, when warranted, he was able to all but decide on his own how a particular report might be played.
As an example he cited how he was adamant all day Tuesday that his broadcast not open with the obituary of the Rev. Jerry Falwell, who had died earlier in the day.

And this one in the Washington Post:

For years now, network executives have been talking about ways to revamp the nightly news, which has been losing audience share for two decades, in an era of instantaneous information … what really works, it turns out, is an older guy with a decidedly traditional newscast.

First, the comfort level. Gibson does seem completely at ease in his role. And that's one of those elusive sorts of qualities that can't be measured, only noticed. It's the same as when you walk out of the movie theater saying "He owned that role." (Like Ryan Gosling in "Half Nelson" last year.) If a journalist is in command of his or her presentation, viewers tend to be drawn in.

Secondly, familiarity and traditional appeal. These are important concepts when it comes to talking about the older audience that watches network evening newscasts. As with Micheal Kinsley's famous quip about Al Gore – he called the former Veep "an old person's idea of a young person"—Charlie Gibson is an old person's idea of a network anchor. And as much as the news industry is evolving and broadening, the network newscast remains the Old School Main Street in MediaVille. And going for the safe, tried and true, at least for now, is a winning – albeit not quite novel – approach.