ABC news offers live West Coast feed

If you’ve tuned into ABC’s “World News Tonight” on the West Coast in recent days, you’ve seen some stories that viewers in the rest of the country didn’t get in their broadcasts.

Last Thursday, it was a piece on California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s state of the state address. The next day, there was an account of Google’s announcement of its new video and software offerings at the Consumer Electronics Trade Show in Las Vegas.

On Monday, it was a segment on Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour’s plans for rebuilding that state, laid out in his first post-Hurricane Katrina speech.

These stories all broke too late to make the traditional 6:30 p.m. Eastern time broadcast, which airs live on the East Coast and in the Midwest.

But ABC got them on the air because last week, a few days after the new anchor team of Elizabeth Vargas and Bob Woodruff officially took the helm of “World News Tonight,” the network began doing something different – broadcasting live to the West Coast every night.

This “expanded version” of the evening news, as network executives call it, marks ABC’s most dramatic effort to date to keep up in an era of increasingly customized news.

“For far too long we have been ignoring a large segment of our audience and they really deserve and demand, in a very competitive environment, the most up-to-date news,” says Jon Banner, executive producer of “World News Tonight.”

“We were sort of cheating our West Coast viewers into accepting the same news that was played three hours earlier,” he says.

The Western editions of “World News Tonight” not only will allow ABC to offer viewers the latest on developing news stories, Banner says, but also will give the network an opportunity to highlight regional stories such as immigration and wildfires that do not always make the original broadcast.

Judy Muller, a former ABC correspondent who teaches journalism at the University of Southern California, says the effort will be embraced by West Coast affiliates, who have long been frustrated with the New York-produced newscasts that often include local stories that are old by the time they air.

But she cautions that tailoring a customized West Coast edition of the evening news could undercut the notion of a national newscast, in which all viewers are exposed to the same information.

“I think there’s a real fear that someday we’ll end up with an Amazon.com version of news, in which your name will come up, and it will say, ‘We think you’d be interested in these stories,’ ” she says. “The danger in that is that there are many stories that we all need to know about.”

The idea of a Western newscast is not entirely new. Back in 1979, CBS launched a West Coast version of the “CBS Evening News” that ended at some point in the 1980s.

Rival networks are quick to point out that nowadays, they, too broadcast live to the West Coast – when the news merits.

“They have not reinvented the wheel here,” says Rome Hartman, executive producer of the “CBS Evening News,” who noted that last week CBS updated its West Coast feeds with developing news about the West Virginia mine accident story.

“When there’s news that breaks on a clock after the East Coast feed of the evening news, we’re going to cover it.”