The anchor team of Elizabeth Vargas and Bob Woodruff are set to replace the late Peter Jennings at ABC’s World News Tonight, The Associated Press reports.
ABC News hopes Vargas, 43, and Woodruff, 44, will establish an anchor team that can measure up to the late Jennings, who had been the sole anchor for nearly 22 years until he died of lung cancer on Aug. 7.
ABC News President David Westin said, “You need more than one anchor. One person can’t do all of this.” He feels this new team will also attract younger viewers to a format that has one of the oldest audiences in television. “This is the right team to take us forward,” Westin told AP. “My clear goal is to make sure we have the strategy for the future and not just the past.”
Veteran ABC newsman Charles Gibson, co-host of Good Morning America, however, was not included in the mix, even though he, Vargas and Woodruff have been the main substitutes since Jennings announced in April that he had lung cancer. ABC decided to leave Gibson at Good Morning America and not disrupt its success as morning news programs have proven to be the most lucrative and chief area of growth for broadcast networks.
ABC also announced Monday that World News Tonight would be the first network evening newscast to broadcast live for three different time zones–Eastern, Mountain and Pacific. Vargas and Woodruff will travel frequently to the site of major news and update stories during the day on the Internet and for cell-phone users.
Vargas, a self-described Army brat who is married to singer-songwriter Marc Cohn, will also keep her job as co-anchor of the ABC newsmagazine 20/20 and will become the first chief network anchor of Hispanic heritage. Woodruff, a lawyer who turned to journalism after working in Beijing during the Tiananmen Square uprising, previously covered the Justice Department for ABC and was the weekend World News Tonight anchor.
The new team will officially start on January 3, 2006.
