The “NewsHour” team: Jim Lehrer, center, with (from left) Ray Suarez, Margaret Warner, Judy Woodruff, Gwen Ifill and Jeffrey Brown.

NewsHour on PBS to Get Makeover

We watch this show every night and we feel like these people, Lehrer, Suarez, Warner, Woodruff, Ifill, and Brown are part of our family. We trust them (me more than Anne).

This format change (two anchors, smaller segments) is probably a good thing but whether they say so or not, it seems to mark the beginning of a transition when the 75 year old Lehrer will retire. While any one of the rest of his team could anchor the show permanently, there’s something very reassuring about Jim Lehrer, I’d say he’s the Walter Chronkite of this era.

The changes are also an acknowledgment that while some still view the program “start to finish,” Ms. Winslow said, “many, many people simply don’t have the time to watch a one-hour broadcast of anything anymore.”

While this may be a good thing for their watchability, it may be a bad thing for in-depth journalism. We watch this show because of the long story format. Making things shorter will bring it closer to CNN with a different cast of characters.

Unusually, Ms. Winslow said, there is almost no crossover between the program’s viewers and those who use its Web site, which has about 500,000 unique visitors weekly. The new Web and broadcast correspondent will attempt to bridge that gap. Ms. Winslow said she was looking for someone who was both new-media savvy and “a credentialed journalist.”

This I think is an important idea and probably essential for the survival of this program. Time will tell how well they pull it off and I wish them my best. It does seem like this move is aimed squarely at me, a person in the demographic who watches the NewsHour nightly but unusually, also one who is comfortable viewing content on the web and uses their web site when I miss a show. It might be that this transition will make time shifting shows with a Tivo irrelevant. Let’s hope so since I’ve not bought a Tivo yet and this show would be a primary reason I’d buy one.