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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.
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