Dan Rather, Ready For His HD Close-Up

Rather's friends see him as reenergized after a troubled period. "It's nice to see him take that straitjacket off from the anchor desk and go out and report," Nelson says. "He's like a kid again. He's beating the bushes like a cub reporter."

Still, HDNet, which reaches 3 million homes through satellite and cable, is hardly a mass-market vehicle. "We're dealing with a small audience, a very small audience," Rather says. "I have no illusions about that. But it's a quality audience." The problem with huge media companies, says the man who spent his career working for one, is that "they have legislative and regulatory needs in Washington. They have the imperative of increasing stockholder value. What we've learned in the last 25 to 35 years is that this creates all kinds of potential pressures and influences on what news consumers get."

With his new venture, says Rather, "there's no ratings pressure at all, none, zero. No demographic pressure, zero. Where else in television -- or, for that matter, radio or print -- can you say that? This is light-years away."

And what does he think of the newly revamped "CBS Evening News With Katie Couric"? Rather begs off, saying he's been traveling and has caught only part of one newscast.

Numbers Game

Many NBC staffers were in a celebratory mood last week. After a summer of intense publicity surrounding Katie Couric's move to CBS, Tuesday's "NBC Nightly News" outdrew the "CBS Evening News" by almost 2 million viewers. For the first four days of last week, Brian Williams's newscast averaged 8.8 million viewers, compared with 8.1 million for ABC's Charlie Gibson and 7.1 million for Couric, her second straight week in third place.

It was a long climb back for perennial leader NBC after Couric won her first two weeks in September.

"It was inevitable that there was going to be some sampling, and logical that more sampling would come from us because Katie came from NBC," says "Nightly News" Executive Producer John Reiss. "Now people are coming back and frankly we're very happy about it."

But CBS executives see the race differently. Compared with the same week a year ago, they say, their new anchor is looking good -- up 8 percent, compared to slight declines at the other broadcasts.

"Nobody here expected us to launch and be No. 1 immediately and stay there for months at a time," says CBS News President Sean McManus. "As long as we continue to be up, I'm satisfied we're making progress."

In the key 25-54 age group, CBS is up 19 percent from a year ago, but still in third place. NBC edged ABC among those viewers, an encouraging showing for Gibson.

Williams and Gibson have stuck with more traditional newscasts, while Couric is doing a faster-paced program with such new wrinkles as a daily commentary segment.

McManus, noting that all new anchors lose ground in the early months, dismisses suggestions that the broadcast contains less hard news.