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ABC News has announced that Elizabeth Vargas and Bob Woodruff will co-anchor World News Tonight, which will broadcast a live version to the West Coast each night in addition to its regular telecast for the East Coast and central states, Mediaweek writes. Vargas and Woodruff, along with Charles Gibson - currently co-host of ABC’s Good Morning America - have been co-anchoring World News Tonight since Peter Jennings’s death.
While ABC News president David Westin said that Vargas and Woodruff, along with producer Jon Banner, “provide the leadership we need,” the New York Times reports that the network appointed those two as permanent anchors only after it failed to come to an agreement with Gibson.
In an interview, Gibson said that he and Westin agreed to disagree about terms of an agreement, but an unnamed source involved in the negotiations said that, while Gibson wanted to remain as anchor through the 2008 presidential election, Westin was offering a shorter tenure of just two years, with Vargas and Woodruff to take over at that point.
Westin’s decision to go with the younger anchors - Vargas and Woodruff are 43 and 44 respectively - shows his determination to invest in the future, according to the Times.
Keeping Gibson in his post on Good Morning America seems to make sense, however, as the show is a huge money-maker from an advertising standpoint. That show, always fighting to catch up with longtime leader Today on NBC, may have a chance to do just that, as Today’s Katie Couric has been considering jumping the NBC ship and joining CBS as its nightly news anchor.
As both the morning and evening news shows face changes in reporting - ABC’s Nightline, too, has recently been revamped - it will be interesting to see how the shake-ups affect the Big 3 networks in their competition against each other.
Though off-air online and experiential advertising grew modestly as a part of the overall radio revenue pie, and election-related political ads increased in Q3, total radio ad revenues were down 9% to $4.97 billion for Q3 and down 10% for…
Glamour magazine is running its photo of Britney Spears not only on the cover of the U.S. edition, but on the covers in seven other countries, as well.
Britney will grace Russia, Sweden and Greece’s editions of Glamour, among others.…
Titan Worldwide has signed a five-year deal with the Delaware River Port Authority to manage out-of-home advertising for the Port Authority Transit corp.
The contract covers advertising on PATCO’s rail service and stations between Southern New Jersey and Philadelphia, writes Mediaweek.…
Publicis has acquired full-service agency W&K Communications, continuing its Asia expansion that began several years ago.
W&K will be pulled under the umbrella of Publicis’s Burnett agency network, and will be renamed Leo Burnett Beijing Advertising, writes Adweek.
Other recent Publicis…
With only four weeks separating Thanksgiving and Christmas this year, Cyber Monday One (December 1) and Cyber Monday Two (December 
may command a greater share of online sales than they have in years past - thus increasing the importance…
Top American non-luxury auto brands received higher ratings and less negative comments from online consumers than competing Japanese brands, according to an analysis of consumer opinions collected from automotive review websites by Biz360, MarketingCharts reports.
The research, which aggregated a year’s…
