The Hollywood Reporter's Paul J. Gough writes about the battle for nightly news supremacy between ABC News and NBC News, and equates it to the Democratic presidential race.

"For all intents and purposes, it's a tie ballgame," said Jonathan Banner, EP of the ABC's World News with Charles Gibson. "It's a very competitive race."

Nightly News with Brian Williams EP Alexandra Wallace talks in political terms as well. "We've won the popular vote — but you're right, we're in the same neighborhood," she said.

So far this calendar year, ABC and NBC have each won the A25-54 demo seven times for the week, while NBC has won in Total Viewers 11 times compared to three for ABC.

"It has been this way all season, and it doesn't look like it's going to change much anytime soon," Gough writes.

Andrew Tyndall of the Tyndall Report (the go-to site for the network evening broadcasts) has come out with his 2007 Year in Review, with a breakdown of the stories covered and who covered them.

The War in Iraq, specifically the angle of US-led combat, clearly had the lead in coverage, with 1,157 stories between the three networks. NBC had the most stories, filing 407 reports (compared to 379 from CBS and 370 from ABC). The second most-covered individual story was the Virginia Tech massacre (244 total stories) and third was the California wildfires (221).

Interestingly, Iraq war coverage effectively ended in late September after Gen. David Petraeus testified to Congress. The networks devoted an average of 30 minutes per week to the war before the testimony; and 4 minutes per week, after.

The presidential election was covered at a far greater length in 2007 than previous penultimate years. The combined coverage of anything election-related amounted to 1,072 stories, with CBS leading the pack with 397 stories (NBC had 347 and ABC had 320). In the previous four Presidential election cycles, the networks aired 946 election stories in all the penultimate years (2003, 1999, 1995, 1991) combined.

Click continued to see which reporters were used the most by their networks.

continued...

Resignations (Gonzales, Craig, Snow) and proclamations (Thompson) will dominate tomorrow's Sunday shows.

• Fox News Sunday: Sen. Patrick Leahy and Sen. Arlen Specter will talk about what's next for the Justice Department in the wake of the resignation of Atty. General Alberto Gonzales. Also, Counselor to the President, Ed Gillespie will be a guest.

• This Week with George Stephanopolous: Sen. John Ensign and Sen. Chuck Schumer will talk about their party's chances in '08.

• Face the Nation with Bob Schieffer: Politics and Iraq are on the agenda. Sen. Lindsey Graham will guest. Schieffer will also debrief Evening News anchor Katie Couric (or will Couric debrief Schieffer?) who is reporting from Baghdad.

• Meet the Press with Tim Russert: punditpalooza with Democratic stragetists James Carville and Bob Shrum and Republican strategists Mary Matalin and Mike Murphy.

BTW, last Sunday's Meet the Press had it's "best total viewer delivery since May 20, 2007," according to an NBC press release. It topped CBS by 40%, ABC by 50% and Fox by 173% in total viewers.

The current landscape of network evening news anchors — Katie Couric, Charlie Gibson, and Brian Williams — was formed almost one year ago, when Couric started at CBS. USA Today's Peter Johnson writes that Americans are still adjusting to the three "new kids" after many years of Tom Brokaw, Peter Jennings, and Dan Rather.

"The marketplace is incredibly turbulent — churned up more than a farmer's field in October," NBC News president Steve Capus tells the paper.

So, what to make of Gibson and World News being #1 at this one-year point? Tom Rosenstiel of the Project for Excellence in Journalism says "it's no surprise that the audience for these shows respond to an anchor who has seen it all and who seems to understand this hard news agenda. After all these years, it's the Cronkite model."

"I think certainly that CBS made a mistake on leading with shopping when the other two broadcasts led with the senator's health. And they seemed to be scrambling to get it on when they did... third in their lineup," an e-mailer writes in response to this post. "But the two previous nights, CBS was by far the hardest of the three newscasts, including on Monday when they aired a report from Elizabeth Palmer in Tehran on the views of Iranian Jews at the time a Holocaust denial conference was going on in their backyard. I believe ABC was doing shopping for high tech presents at the same time.

Now here's my question: Why aren't critics commenting on her having the hardest broadcast when she does? There seems to be an incredibly unfair standard here..."

What's the difference between NBC and CBS? Rachel Sklar knows:

"Yesterday, on the day when South Dakota Senator Tim Johnson fell ill with an apparent stroke and seemed in danger of being replaced by a Republican handpicked by Republican governor Mike Rounds, thus changing the balance of power in the Senate from Democrat to Republican, the CBS news led with... holiday shopping. (12 shopping days left 'til Christmas!). NBC's [Brian] Williams, meanwhle, led with the Johnson story, pulling in updates from correspondent Chip Reid and sitting with NBC Washington Bureau chief Tim Russert to discuss the move and its ramification." More...

Thursday's LAT includes plenty of praise for the networks from, well, the networks:

David Westin, president, ABC News: After "a fair number of unexpected challenges, to have our team do such an effective job means a lot to everybody here. There is a very good sense of progress and enthusiasm."

Paul Friedman, vice president, CBS News: "This was [Katie Couric's] first crack at this job, and it's a really difficult job, and everybody went out of it saying, 'OK, this is going to work.' And she came out of it saying, 'OK, I can do this.' She was pumped."

Phil Alongi, executive producer, NBC News: "I thought we rocked last night. We want to win, but the ratings aren't what it's about. We got it right, and that's what it was about."

> Update: 1:38pm: "Regarding James Poniewozik's comments about a network newscast in prime time... The cable news networks don't even do news in prime time! Why would the broadcast networks do it?," an e-mailer asks...

Time's James Poniewozik imagines a primetime newscast:

"This change, if it ever comes, won't happen tomorrow or this year, because no single network has both problems bad enough at the same time. NBC is bleeding in prime time, but it has the top-rated newscast. CBS has, er, Katie Couric, but it still has a good half of the primetime top 10 shows any given week. But with these two trains converging on the network track, it's not hard to see the day, some coming season, when a foundering network under corporate pressure gives the nightly news an hour in primetime to save itself or die trying. It may be 8 p.m., the hour NBC just surrendered to reality programming. It may be 10 p.m., where the networks have been unable to launch new dramas this year, and which would lead in to local newscasts. Local affiliates would love to have the 6:30 half-hour for more Seinfeld reruns, and beaten-up network news divisions would love one more chance to prove that they matter."

More...

NBC's occasional "viewer e-mail" segments and CBS's upcoming "Free Speech" feature are two examples of "a stepped-up effort...to humanize their news anchors and newscasts through increased interaction with viewers," the NYP's Adam Buckman writes.

"We're trying to lift the veil a bit," NBC Nightly New EP John Reiss says. "You've heard [news anchors in the past being referred to as] 'the voice of God,' and we are definitely trying to get away from that to a certain degree. And one way to do that is to be a bit more interactive."

But World News EP Jon Banner seems skeptical: "We have a very limited amount of time to provide context and analysis and provide a clear picture of what happened that day."

The three network evening newscasts "devote roughly the same amount of time to the same set of stories," Dan Bobkoff sighs in a column for Public Eye. He thinks the shows "should try to become as different from one another as possible."

Step one: Turn off all the TV's in the newsroom. Step two: Cancel their subscriptions to The New York Times. "With nothing to copy off the TV or from the papers, the newscasts then could think about broadening what they cover. They've all fallen into a habit of covering only certain places and issues. I think each show should strive to feature at least one truly original story a night," Bobkoff writes. The nets would argue that they're doing that -- by establishing investigative units, for instance. But it's obviously not enough. (Via Romenesko)