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The contrast with Sawyer's newscast is clear. Since we trace the changes there back to Sherwood's arrival as president of ABC News, the following data are for the year to date (January through September) as opposed to the four-month data on Pelley's changes.
1.New York Central: Sawyer has configured her newscast around her anchor desk. More stories were filed by correspondents with a New York dateline on ABC than on the other two newscasts combined (450 reports v CBS 221, NBC 152). She is developing a core cadre of New-York-based correspondents with no specialist beat, assigned to whatever story happens to surface on any given day, to form a GMA-style in-studio team: David Muir, Sharyn Alfonsi and Jim Avila. Along with ABC's two inside-the-Beltway regulars, Jake Tapper at the White House and Jonathan Karl on Capitol Hill, those five correspondents accounted for almost one-third (30%) of all reporters' airtime on ABC: by contrast the top five most heavily used correspondents at CBS and NBC occupied 26% and 25% of reporters' airtime respectively.
2.World News No More: the corollary of focusing on New York is to downplay international coverage. On the three measures Tyndall Report uses to track foreign coverage, ABC was the laggard on each one: stories filed with a foreign dateline (408 min v CBS 601, NBC 678); stories on United States foreign policy (249 min v CBS 346, NBC 328); international stories, with no USFP involvement (697 min v CBS 879, NBC 985). ABC has been especially unenthusiastic about the events of the so-called Arab Spring: combine the coverage of Egypt, Libya and Syria together (258 min v CBS 447, NBC 459) and ABC devoted barely half as much time to those stories as its rivals.
3.Agenda Setting: one of the weaknesses of these legacy newscasts in the contemporary news environment is that they may merely re-summarize headline developments that have already been thoroughly covered by rival news media. ABC's solution has been to cut back dramatically on major news developments (1393 min on the Top Thirty stories v CBS 1808, NBC 1764), freeing Sawyer to set her own agenda. In part she relies on her morning-show celebrity-tabloid sensibility. For example, total the time spent on Oprah Winfrey's retirement, the British royal wedding, and the trials of Casey Anthony and Michael Jackson's doctor (still ongoing) and ABC (117 min v CBS 57, NBC 63) easily outstripped its rivals. In part, World News has been used to cross-promote Sawyer's own "gets": her exclusives on Jacqueline Kennedy's oral history, Donald Rumsfeld's memoir Known & Unknown and Jaycee Dugard (52 min in total v CBS 0, NBC 8) were treated as virtually unnewsworthy by the other newscasts. In part, ABC has decided to generate its own stories, to illustrate underlying trends. Most prominent has been Made in America, the Muir-&-Alfonsi series (72 min) publicizing the predominance of imports in domestic household furnishings.
4.News You Can Use: the Made in America series is an example of Sawyer's turn towards service journalism. Instead of covering the failings of the macro-economy as a policy problem, as CBS tends to under Pelley, Made in America made it personal: if we Americans, in our capacity as consumers, practiced import substitution in our purchases, the failures of the labor market would be mitigated. ABC specializes in beats on the personal rather than the societal level: Health-&-Medicine (179 min v CBS 144, NBC 100); Sex-&-Family (148 min v CBS 111, NBC 93); Food-&-Diet (79 min v CBS 42, NBC 43). The newscast is chock-full of features with strip-formatted titles to assist viewers in changing the way they live and to suggest that ABC News can be their personal agent: Richard Besser's Healthy Living addresses the healthcare system from the point of view of the patient's lifestyle; Claire Shipman's Second Acts offers anecdotes of successful retirement planning; Chris Cuomo's Bringing America Back features inspirational small businesses; Dollars & Sense on prudent personal finance; Consumer Watchdog on ripoffs and Washington Watchdog on waste-fraud-abuse.
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