Today Charles Gibson ended his 19-year tenure on ABC’s “Good Morning America”. He will go on to the prestigious job as permanent replacement for Peter Jennings in the Anchor chair at ABC’s “World News Tonight”. There he will battle it out with another morning star, Katie Couric, who recently left NBC’s “The Today Show” to be the first sole female anchor on “CBS Evening News”. Who cares? A few people, apparently.

Searches on Yahoo! For “Good Morning America” increased by 213% since yesterday and “The Today Show” by 92%. But to put it in perspective though, searches on Fox’s reality show “Hell’s Kitchen” increased over 500 percent since yesterday and beat out the morning shows by a long shot in the number of total searches.

The truth is that the network evening news has lost a lot of its appeal. In today’s connected world, most people find their news on the Web during the day and by the time the evening news comes on, it is old news, literally. In fact, the average viewer of network news is over 60 years old. The PR that these anchor changes gives to the networks are most likely only temporary. The media moguls agree that the format of network news need to be shaken up to attract the younger audience.

“What is happening is, in short, a revolution in the way people are accessing news. They don’t want a god-like figure from above to tell them what’s important. And to carry the religion analogy a bit further, they certainly don’t want their news presented as gospel”, said Rupert Murdoch in a presentation to The American Society of Newspaper Editors already last year.

It is clear that a modern newscast has to be designed to work across different platforms, as well as having the ability be personalized and interactive. The networks will likely continue to follow new developments in news such as citizen journalism and community filtered websites such as digg. The million dollar question is when will the tipping point occur and how long will Charles Gibson remain in the pulpit? 

Related Links:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060628/ap_on_en_tv/tv_gibson_s_goodbye_2

http://www.cbsnews.com

http://www.digg.com