At Newsmags, Aiming Straight For the Eyes

A beauty queen accused of murdering her husband. A woman accused of killing her pastor husband. A man convicted of killing his bride on their honeymoon. A newly married man who disappears from a cruise ship. A boot-camp director accused of murdering a teenager. A former model and her boyfriend who disappear on a boating trip. An 18-year-old whose partially clothed body was found in a car trunk.

These are among the blood-and-guts stories featured on NBC's "Dateline" in the last three months.

CBS's "48 Hours" has covered murders almost exclusively for the past two years. "I stopped thinking of ourselves as a general newsmagazine," says Executive Producer Susan Zirinsky. "I am Darwinian in my core, and to survive I've adapted."

Television news -- especially local television -- has always been drawn to crime. But in a country in which more than 16,000 murders were committed last year, are the killings of ordinary people, however tragic, really worth all this airtime?

"I think it lends itself to storytelling," says David Corvo, executive producer of "Dateline." "You've got a confrontation, right and wrong, guilt or innocence, and a resolution, and there's some suspense getting to that resolution."

The tabloidization of these programs comes as the networks have fallen out of love with newsmagazines, which were crippled by overexposure. As recently as 1999, magazine shows served up a dozen hours a week. Over the years, "Eye to Eye," "Public Eye," "Now," "West 57th," "60 Minutes II" and others came and went. "Dateline" and "48 Hours" have largely been relegated to weekends.

Among the other survivors, CBS's "60 Minutes" and ABC's "20/20" are still based on the original concept of a wide-ranging show that encompasses news, trend stories and lighter features. ABC's "Primetime Live" includes a number of murder stories but many other subjects as well.

"48 Hours" specializes in older cases that it can follow through the court system: an Ohio husband found not guilty of his wife's murder after three trials. A reopened investigation that led to a conviction in the 1969 murder of a Michigan woman. The hunt for a serial killer in Australia. The killing of a Bellevue, Wash., couple in 1994. The 1995 murder of a policeman's wife. A Texas woman convicted of killing her husband in 2002.

Zirinsky says she made the shift two years ago after ratings showed that "the crime genre really kind of resonated" with the audience. "I make no apologies. We love doing it."

At the suggestion of Les Moonves, CBS's chief executive, "48 Hours" dropped the idea of having an anchor and begins each program with the narrative, without so much as an introduction.

Thanks to the rise of cable news, Zirinsky says, "the audience no longer needs a potpourri magazine show. They're getting it in too many places." And with the growth of "Survivor"-type shows in recent years, "reality television has bitten us in the rear." Zirinsky calls her program "reality drama."

Television analyst Andrew Tyndall, who dubs the crime sagas "cliffhanger journalism," says newsmagazines proliferated because they were less expensive to produce than sitcoms or dramas -- but that was before the blossoming of reality shows. "Journalists are cheaper than actors," he says. "It turned out that real people are cheaper than journalists."