Inside sources at NBC (GE) revealed that the executive producer of the "Nightly News" show John Reiss will be reassigned after less than a couple of years on the job, according to an anomymous NBC network executive. The official announcement should come within the week.
The reasons give were that Brian Williams, Tom Brokaw's replacement, didn't get along with Reiss. But more importantly, their major news rival ABC and their anchor Charles Gibson have been making headway against the "Nightly News," especially among female viewers, and that more than anything seems to be the key to the reassignment.
For the majority of the last 10 years, "Nightly News" has been at the top of the news heap, something that continued when Williams took over for Brokaw.
With Gibson anchoring "World News" since June, they have incrementally moved their way to the point where they became more popular in February sweeps for the first time since November 2001 over NBC. They won in general viewership and also in the 25-to-54 age group as well, according to Nielsen Media Research.
For 2007, NBC has dropped to under 9.8 million viewers, from 10 million, while "World News" has moved up to 9.5 million viewers a night, up from the same period of 2006. CBS is a distant third with a 7.6 million average.
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