Anchor Duo To Succeed Jennings at ABC News

"The evening news is locked into two things -- a half-hour format and the existing time slot," said Bob Zelnick, a former ABC correspondent who now chairs Boston University's journalism department. "You can talk about ensembles, guys parachuting in from Comedy Central, new formats that appeal to bubblegum-chomping 12-year-olds, but you can't do it."

Steve Friedman, a former executive producer of "Today" and CBS's "Early Show," said the male-female pairing "is what people are used to seeing in local news." Friedman foresees an "indoor-outdoor show" in which Woodruff spends much of his time racing to breaking-news events.

"Anybody who goes in there and tries to reinvent the wheel is going to lose," he said. "You have to put different spokes on the wheel."

Erik Sorenson, a former president of MSNBC, said "there are some real advantages" to being able to dispatch one of the anchors to various hot spots, "but not a lot of benefit with two people sitting within three feet of each other."

Said Sorenson, who was executive producer of the "CBS Evening News" during the failed Rather-Chung experiment of the early 1990s: "The downside is, it's a 22-minute broadcast and you're splitting up the fact time between two people. . . . There's certainly some risk for ABC to do this, but this is the time to take a risk."

During the swirl of speculation about the decision, many industry insiders, including some ABC staffers, expected Gibson to get the nod, even though he and Diane Sawyer have been closing the ratings gap with Couric and Matt Lauer at "Today." As recently as last month, Woodruff explored the possibility of jumping to another network and had a conversation with Sean McManus, the new president of CBS News, who did not make an offer, according to industry sources who declined to be named because of the sensitivity of personnel discussions.

"Charlie has always loved 'World News Tonight' " and would have been "perfectly happy" to take the job, Westin said, praising what he called Gibson's "heroic" double shifts after Jennings's death. Gibson, who initially rotated the evening duties with Vargas, gave way to Woodruff in September after contracting pneumonia.

"Let's be honest, they're younger, they're prettier," Emily Rooney, a former ABC producer, said of Vargas and Woodruff. She said Woodruff has more "gravitas" but that both anchors bring appealing qualities to the job.

"Bob Woodruff is brilliant," said Rooney, who hosts two talk shows on Boston's WGBH-TV. "He can ad-lib and put information out in a seamless manner. Elizabeth, I think, is very serious and studious. She's not the classic prima donna. I don't think anybody will resent her."

Vargas, a "20/20" co-anchor who will continue in that role, is the better-known of the two, having been a substitute anchor for several years, including during the death of Ronald Reagan and the Elian Gonzalez case, which won her an Emmy.

She grew up as an Army brat, in Germany and Okinawa, without a television, and her first job -- while in college -- was Saturday anchor for the ABC affiliate in Columbia, Mo., for $3.35 an hour. After stints in Reno and Phoenix, where her bosses "told me I was a lousy anchor," she joined CBS News in Chicago and later became a correspondent for NBC's "Dateline."

Vargas has handled a range of feature stories not normally associated with an evening news anchor, hosting one-hour "Vanished" specials about missing people, along with programs on same-sex marriage, surrogate parenting and miracles.

Woodruff is better known as a field reporter, having won attention for his coverage of Hurricane Katrina and the Asian tsunami, as well as his reporting from Afghanistan and as an embedded reporter during the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

A New York corporate attorney who moved to China to train lawyers in 1988 -- two days after what he calls a "shotgun wedding" -- Woodruff wound up working as Rather's "fixer" and translator in the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square uprising.

He "caught the journalism bug," abandoning the law to become an NBC local reporter in Redding, Calif., Richmond and Phoenix. Woodruff joined ABC for stints in Chicago, London and Washington, where he covered the Justice Department during the Clinton administration.

Although the new broadcast doesn't launch until Jan. 3, the two will essentially be co-anchoring next week when Vargas heads for Baghdad to cover the Iraqi elections.