Two for the Road

"Both Elizabeth and I have been on television doing this for a long time," Woodruff says. "It's not as if we're brand-new." But neither is accustomed to the intense scrutiny.

The mantra at the network headquarters on West 66th Street is two anchors for two people's work. "It has opened the door to having the resources to cover the news in a different way," says Executive Producer Jon Banner. "We can send one anchor hither and yon without having to worry about something breaking while they're away."

But the newscast has a split-screen feel, even when both anchors are here in New York, where they have been squeezed onto Jennings's horseshoe-shaped set, now being rebuilt to accommodate two people. They rarely address each other on camera or appear together, except to recite the headlines at the top and to say goodbye at the end. No one would have any way of knowing they are friends. Banner says they want to use every available second for news.

"Nobody should expect to see morning television at 6:30 in the evening. Ain't gonna happen," he says.

"I don't think we're ever going to be in the chitchat mode," Vargas says.

The show-on-the-road motif has its pluses and minuses. Do viewers really care whether an anchor, as opposed to a beat reporter, is on the scene in an age when cable news hopscotches around the world all day and night? On the other hand, the time and expense involved in moving an anchor, crew and support staff means the story at hand will undoubtedly get more attention.

Earlier this month, ABC dispatched Woodruff from Iran to Israel -- a difficult route involving a long delay in Turkey -- when it looked as if Ariel Sharon was about to die. When the prime minister hung on, Woodruff's presence looked superfluous. He says he "argued vociferously" against overplaying the daily Sharon updates.

"The great danger is to overemphasize the story simply because the anchor is there," Woodruff says.

But when Woodruff was in Mountain View, Calif., for a previously planned interview with the founders of Google, he arrived on a day when the Internet giant was under fire for refusing to turn over search records in a federal pornography probe. "Sometimes you get lucky," he says.

At 2:30 a.m. Thursday, Woodruff called Banner from Amman, Jordan, to say he was going back to Israel after learning that the terrorist group Hamas had won the Palestinian elections. Although he would have been reluctant to send a solo anchor to the Middle East as Bush's State of the Union address was approaching, Banner says, with two anchors, "that was a no-brainer."

Still, everyone knows that Vargas and Woodruff, and the second-place newscast they inherited, face an uphill climb in the battle for ratings and advertising dollars.

They averaged 9.09 million viewers last week, more than 1 million behind "NBC Nightly News With Brian Williams" but about 1.2 million ahead of the resurgent "CBS Evening News With Bob Schieffer." The ABC newscast has also lost 800,000 viewers since the season began. But the others have shed viewers as well, and Banner was encouraged by a slight narrowing of the gap with NBC compared with a year earlier.