CBS won a special kind of ratings war at the Radio-Television News Directors Association (RTNDA) conference this September in hot and hazy New Orleans. A date with CBS Hall of Famer Walter Cronkite ("A restaurant of Walter's choice. And he pays!") was auctioned off for a fellowship fund - and, at $1,600, fetched eight times as much as the baseball cap signed by NBC's Tom Brokaw got the next day.

 The 1997 RTNDA was bigger and flashier than ever: more than 3,000 TV and radio newspeople took to the streets, hotels, and bars, bearing their CBS handbags, ABC name tags, and NBC phone cards. There was almost nothing in the air-conditioned halls of the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center that did not whisper or scream out the name of some company in the business. At the three-day conference, ABC and NBC sponsored luncheons on Thursday and Friday, while CBS picked up the tab for the gala banquet on Saturday. CNN ran the show at a party where a Zydeco-pop band worked the dance floor and created brand-name awareness: "How are ya feeling, CNN?"

 Squashed in between daytime events with titles such as "Marketing Yourself," "News & Promotion: Creating A Winning Team," and "Profitable Partnerships: Bridging the Gap Between News and Sales," a few panels served as reminders that the good, old-fashioned product called "journalism" is in trouble. In "Credibility Crisis: Why Is the Public Losing Faith?," CNN's Judy Woodruff called for the owners to get involved in the debate, and Dan Rather reiterated his concern about the profession in an overcrowded meeting unaptly titled "One on One with Dan Rather."

 Rather reminded a youthful audience of the bygone era of Edward R. Murrow and Cronkite, and of CBS's tradition as a writers' network. He gave a journalism student attending the conference three tips on what to work on for a budding career: "Writing, writing, and writing."

 But in a panel on "Effective Investigative Reporting," a Miami-based reporter, WFOR's Mark Hyman, showed how he got that elusive audience to watch - fast-paced clips with nervously shifting camera angles and chart-music sounds. Hyman introduced himself as "the investigative reporter for the MTV-generation."

 So what is going to win out in the end - investigative-goes-MTV or the writers' tradition? Heaven knows. And heaven - rumors have it - will be sponsored by Microsoft.

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