tv's magazine shakeout

Just a year ago, the major networks were bursting with newsmagazines and considering plenty of new ones for prime time. Back then, it appeared that the genre had nowhere to go but up. CBS, NBC, and Fox were so confident in the appeal of these shows that they dangled scars of them before Diane Sawyer in an unsuccessful effort to lure her away from ABC.

But the boom is over and the bust seems to have begun. Ratings for most of the TV newsmagazines have declined dramatically and audiences are turning to one-hour dramas like ER in droves. Fox put its planned magazine, Full Disclosure, on hold and ABC reduced Turning Point to a series of specials. Meanwhile, many network executives think ABC's Day One and CBS's 48 Hours and Eye to Eye with Connie Chung could face the ax in a big magazine shakeout this season.

As a result, a lot of insiders are worried about their jobs, and many of them blame the network executives who created so many of these shows and oversaturated the market. "The party has been spoiled," says one network news staff member. But the executives, naturally, have other theories.

The proliferation of the magazines has often been explained in simple economic terms: magazines cost about $ 500,000 an episode to produce, versus $ 1 million for a drama. But since dramas can be re-run, while magazines must continually create fresh episodes, the costs tend to even out over the long run. (Unlike entertainment shows, however, a successful newsmagazine like 60 Minutes or 20/20 can run for decades. And when a magazine is successful, it helps a network establish an identity, which is increasingly important as channel capacity grows.)

Network executives say the reason so many magazines were created is that audiences seemed to want them. A year ago established shows like PrimeTime Live, 48 Hours, and Turning Point regularly scored double-digit ratings, putting them in the top of the TV rankings. "The expansion came logically out of an audience interest in the programming," says Andrew Lack, president of NBC News, whose only magazine show, Dateline: NBC, grew in two and a half years from one night a week to three.

So confident were the networks of audience demand for these shows that they began pitting them against each other last summer -- Turning Point vs. 48 Hours, for example, and Dateline: NBC vs. PrimeTime Live. With the magazines competing as they never had before, the viewing audience was diluted. "By going up against each other, we split what is essentially an affinity audience," says CBS News president Eric Ober. "That has more to do with the demise of newsmagazines than any other factor."

Multiple newsmagazines, meanwhile, take a toll on a network's news division, creating competition for high-impact stories and leading to turf wars between the shows and a diminution of quality segments. A case in point is this season's PrimeTime Live, hosted by Diane Sawyer and Sam Donaldson. It has aired bold exposes on government waste, but also resorted to less impressive undercover "investigations" of, say, psychics (see "Hidden cameras: a million-dollar peek," page 15). Meanwhile, the PrimeTime and 20/20 staffs often battle it out for stories at ABC, network sources say.

"We didn't realize the strain these shows would put on our news division," admits Alan Wurtzel, ABC's senior vice president, news magazines. "We spread ourselves thin and that hurt the shows. There are only so many stories out there and everyone is mining the same territory, so sometimes you end up going to another level of stories that you wouldn't otherwise look to."

NBC executives are not buying these theories, however, perhaps because their Dateline, hosted by Jane Pauley and Stone Phillips, is the only newsmagazine whose ratings rose this season. "My competitors have suddenly run wild declaring that there are too many newsmagazines and not enough viewers," says Lack. "But we have proven that's not true. Our audience is growing." At least for now. Ratings can be fickle, and the TV newsmagazine business has become as competitive as it gets.

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