‘PBS NewsHour’ Begins Its Overhaul

The 38-year-old “PBS NewsHour” began a new era this weekend, adding Saturday and Sunday newscasts for the first time and preparing for the debut on Monday of Gwen Ifill and Judy Woodruff as the new weeknight anchor team and the first female co-anchors at any network.

With the new weekend edition, viewers got a different program than they perhaps expected. Stories were mostly shorter, at about four minutes â€" still downright leisurely compared with those on commercial networks, but half the length of many on the weekday PBS program.

On Saturday, the weekend program, anchored by Hari Sreenivasan, had proportionately more video and more field reports, including a story on medical marijuana and another from the longtime NBC News Tel Aviv correspondent Martin Fletcher about Israel’s discovery of offshore natural gas reserves. In a few cities, but not New York, two minutes of local news were inserted. And not least, the “NewsHour” was a half-hour.

The goal for “PBS NewsHour Weekend” is a balance of “continuity and change,” said Marc Rosenwasser, its executive producer, adding: “I’m not sure that ‘NewsHour’ viewers are particularly looking for change. So that’s the line to walk, which is to respect their esteemed brand and at the same time, every weekend show is a kind of a laboratory for change.”

The weeknight edition, in addition to its new anchors, is to undergo other changes on Monday, including a new set that has room for the anchors to sit side by side. The old system put dual anchors at separate desks so viewers “didn’t see them ever talking to each other, looking at each other, relating to each other,” said Linda Winslow, the weekday program’s executive producer.

Thought they are longtime colleagues, Ms. Ifill and Ms. Woodruff, who are also receiving managing editor titles, rehearsed their “relationship” last week, Ms. Winslow said, because “you don’t want it to look simpering or local newsy, but you do want it to have some informality once in a while and some ability to talk to each other.”

The “NewsHour” Web site will also be revamped on Monday, with a greater emphasis on constantly updated news. Still, the biggest change is on weekends, where PBS’s lack of a newscast has been seen as a public television shortcoming. The new program is running in most major markets nationwide, at varying times, although some stations will not begin broadcasts until October.

Mr. Sreenivasan has turned to social media in an effort to attract not only an audience that has never thought to turn to PBS for weekend news, but also younger viewers. He is conducting Google hangouts, or group conversations, and what he calls online “anchor hours” â€" soliciting viewer questions in advance, rather than waiting for after-broadcast comments. “We’re trying to put the public back in public media,” he said.

On a recent Saturday, the weekend staff was practicing in its Midtown Manhattan production offices on the 12th floor of WNET, where the show is based; Mr. Sreenivasan headed uptown by subway to a Lincoln Center studio whenever it was time to pretape an interview, applying his own makeup while looking into a monitor.

The weekend show’s New York base is another change; the weekday program is produced in Washington, by MacNeil/Lehrer Productions and WETA. WNET, the New York station, is producing the new program because it was able to raise the necessary $7 million annual budget at a time when the weekday “NewsHour” was running a major deficit.

After layoffs in June, its first in nearly two decades, the weekday “NewsHour” is in better shape financially, Ms. Winslow said. She did not provide specifics.

The two “NewsHour” teams are coordinating reporting trips and cross-promoting each other’s work on the air. But not surprisingly, with production staffs in different cities, kinks remain, including potential interview guests being contacted by both shows.

“We’ve already had a couple of experiences,” Ms. Winslow said. “We do need a way to make sure we’re not stepping on each other.”

Likewise, the two are trying not to commission the same stories. Mr. Sreenivasan, for one, is both anchoring the weekend show and reporting for the weekday program, but even that has its complexities: a recent report he did on aging in New York was shot by the New York team, written and produced in Washington and â€" because it was paid for by a grant to the weeknight “NewsHour” by the SCAN Foundation â€" out-of-pocket expenses were picked up by that program, Ms. Winslow said.