NBC's Brian Williams, On Top of the News

Williams on the set of No. 1-rated "NBC Nightly News" a year after he took over from Tom Brokaw. (By Helayne Seidman For The Washington Post)

The blog also gives him a chance to vent. He wrote that setting up an interview with New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin took "hours of planning, cajoling. . . . We've conducted interviews with presidents of the United States with less discussion of camera angles, walking distances, duration, lighting and timing."

Williams does a daily introduction for a Webcast version of "Nightly News" and takes home as many as 750 e-mails a night in a blue folder. "These are the customers," he says. In fact, his trip to Mississippi to examine hurricane damage was prompted by e-mail from people in the state who felt ignored with all the media focus on New Orleans. He has also added a periodic segment called "Making a Difference" in response to complaints that television rarely covers good news.

When Williams is in Louisiana, he seems to don a bit of the crusader's mantle. "The damage here seems so fresh. . . . These days in the Lower Ninth Ward, it's the neighborhood that's been left to die," he reported Wednesday, signing off from "this very sad place."

Changing a half-hour newscast in an era of declining news audiences is a difficult task, and the daily editorial conference makes clear how many people are clamoring for the limited airtime.

At Thursday's session, more than a dozen producers run through the stories that could follow Martin Savidge's piece on more people than expected showing up to check out their Ninth Ward homes: Andrea Mitchell building on a Los Angeles Times scoop about the Pentagon planting good-news stories in Iraqi newspapers. Two competing pieces from Iraq (one draws groans because it is 2 minutes 20 seconds, an eternity by network standards). Robert Bazell on World AIDS Day. Tom Costello on identity theft. Pete Williams on a gang of jewelry thieves.

Producers pitch a number of briefs: A South African court legalizing gay marriage. Two U.S. allies withdrawing troops from Iraq. Bush being called for jury duty. They kick around "ribbons," or graphic headlines, for each piece: "War of Words" wins out over "Fit to Print" for Mitchell's story on the Pentagon planting and paying for news in Iraq.

The plan is to devote the last segment to a scene that Williams stumbled upon in New Orleans: a band playing in the street outside K-Paul's restaurant. Another producer suggests a kicker about a cat that mistakenly got shipped to France and is being reunited with its Wisconsin family. Williams, a self-described dog person -- he keeps a picture of his mutt Lucy on his cell phone -- is unenthusiastic. "Yeah, it'll run at 6:28 on every local program," he says.

Another reason the cat item won't fly: Williams believes a post-9/11 newscast should be serious. "If you want sweetness and light, there are 500 cable channels set up to deliver entertaining images," he says. "We don't do light stuff. I won't allow it."

But there are a few wry moments, or as Reiss puts it: "I leave room in the broadcast to just let Brian be Brian." One opportunity came when a chunk of marble fell from the Supreme Court's facade. Williams wrote: "When you see this next story, we do not mean to imply that justice is crumbling in this nation, not even close."

After the editorial meeting, Williams begins tapping out his blog entry -- about, naturally, the New Orleans trip. He describes driving down a dark road and finding it blocked by a three-bedroom house. (His computer, wired to measure his spoken words for broadcast -- his pace is slightly faster than Brokaw's -- times the first part at 2 minutes 33 seconds, even though this is only for Web surfers.) Williams also outlines plans for the upcoming newscast. This reporter's visit is duly noted.

As the 6:30 newscast approaches, Williams grabs a power bar and tweaks the scripts. At 5:14, he starts writing his closing piece on the New Orleans band, capitalizing words for emphasis: "It just might be a sign of SOMETHING -- a band has set up in one of the few bright lights of the French Quarter, and by doing so, they've become a bright spot in a city TRYING to emerge from some VERY dark days." He finishes in six minutes.

There are last-minute judgment calls: Can they describe the Pentagon's Iraq media offensive as "propaganda"? Producer M.L. Flynn wants to talk to defense correspondent Jim Miklaszewski about his sourcing but sees on a wall monitor that he is holding forth on MSNBC's "Hardball."

Williams questions the value of touting an NBC Web posting on ways to avoid identity theft. "Kill it," he says. The show winds up 20 seconds short, so Reiss adds a brief on new economic figures.

Williams heads for the studio moments before airtime. The newscast seems to go flawlessly, but Reiss orders a retake for the top of the 7 p.m. feed to Washington and other markets. The opening picture for Williams's first story showed Mississippi, not New Orleans.

Missing from the program, as on many network newscasts in these days of shuttered bureaus, is any report about a foreign country other than Iraq. Williams acknowledges the trend and says he has pitched the network on a trip to China.

In private, Williams is funny and irreverent -- he's held his own on Jon Stewart's "Daily Show" -- but as a newscaster he tends to be dry, straightforward and a bit formal. With the other networks considering multi-anchor formats -- unless CBS is able to lure Katie Couric from NBC -- Williams could well be the last traditional anchor. It is a description he does not dispute.

"There is a huge market for the broadcast people grew up with, delivered in a modern-day style," he says.