Gibson Out, Sawyer In at ABC's "World News"

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Charles Gibson, who's been at ABC News for at least three decades, has decided to retire as anchor of ABC World News at the end of the year.  Diane Sawyer will take over come January.

Gibson had been anchor of the broadcast for 3 1/2 years, but he was never intended to be the network's long-term solution.  He was co-host of Good Morning America when Peter Jennings died, filling in before Elizabeth Vargas and Bob Woodruff were named co-anchors.  Only when Woodruff was nearly killed in Iraq by a roadside bomb and Vargas deciding to return to co-anchoring 20/20 did ABC decide to give the World News position to Gibson.

Sawyer currently co-hosts GMA with Robin Roberts, and has substituted on World News at various times, so she's no stranger to anchoring.  Before coming to ABC, Sawyer worked for the Nixon White House up until the President's resignation, then she moved to CBS where she became a correspondent for 60 Minutes.   However, Sawyer's best known for her interviews with headliners and celebrities--often in competition with Barbara Walters (who was the first female network evening news co-anchor)--which tended to border on the tabloid.

Sawyer will do a much better job than Katie Couric has done at CBS, having tried and failed to reinvent the wheel--that is, in shaking up an evening news format that's been in place for decades.  Her reward?  Plenty of ridicule, a distant third place, and TV pundits wondering if CBS should have hired Sawyer instead.

Despite the Internet and cable, at least 20 million people still tune into the networks' evening news on a regular basis.  Right now ABC and CBS are looking up at  NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams, which leads the dinnertime ratings, and will likely remain so in the foreseeable future.

(Where was Williams, by the way, during NBC's coverage of Senator Edward Kennedy's funeral motorcade coming through Washington on its way to Arlington National Cemetery?  Tom Brokaw, Williams' predecessor, handled the anchor duties for that one.)

In January, there will be two women--Diane Sawyer and Katie Couric--anchoring the network evening news.  Will people accept getting their news from women after men have been doing it for so long?  Or did ABC just hand its audience over to NBC and Brian Williams?