This changing of the guard is taking place at a time when the role and importance of the network anchor have been dramatically reduced.
"Television news is changing," says Alex Jones, director of the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard's Kennedy School. "In the last several years, we've moved into a situation where the evening news has a smaller audience and an aging audience."
Jennings was the last of the troika - with Tom Brokaw and Dan Rather - who sat in the imperial anchor chair for more than 20 years. But their position of authority was steadily eroded by the growing influence of 24-hour cable news channels such as CNN and Fox News.
"All three networks are starting over," Jones says. "But it will be difficult to come close to the iconic status of the Big Three no matter who they get. [NBC's] Brian Williams? [ABC's most likely candidate] Charlie Gibson? [CBS's] Bob Schieffer? I don't think they're in a comparable position as far as stature and following, and I don't think they're ever likely to be."
Others think that all this twilight-of-the-gods rhetoric is overdone. "Too much has been made of 'the end of the anchor era,' " says Bob Garfield, columnist for Ad Age and cohost of WHYY's On the Media, by e-mail. "There will always be anchors. Audiences demand the authority, stature and celebrity that anchors confer to the reporting of what now passes for network news.
"In fact, when all our news is delivered via the Internet - which will be in about five minutes - there will be anchors doing that, too."
