Claire Harvey: Credibility the anchor

Let's have a superstar news anchor. As TVNZ executives search for someone to fill the 6pm newsreading slot, here's a suggestion which might help to enhance the national broadcaster's credibility, lift the ratings and generate some authority for the nightly bulletin.

Recruit a serious, experienced journalist (not necessarily good-looking or young), give him or her a big salary and insist on a long-term contract.

Let this person be more than a reader of autocues. Instead, make the anchor's role one of involvement in writing and reporting the news.

When a big story breaks, either here or overseas, let them go and cover it, even if that's more expensive and risky than staying in the studio chair with an attendant bevy of hair-straighteners and powder-puffers.

Let them attend and even lead story conferences throughout the day, and give them a voice on how the news should be reported.

That's different, by the way, from inviting the anchor into the newsroom once every six months when the news-promo advertisements are being made, to pretend to be doing all this stuff for the cameras, sagely sipping coffee and saying things like "great yarn, great yarn" while producers pretend to be paying attention.

This is not a criticism of departing TVNZ anchor Judy Bailey, whose combination of intelligence and warmth endeared her to the nation, or any of the other newsreading combinations which have been attempted in the past, some of whom have come close to the anchor-reporter model.

But embracing a different, authoritative model might give the nightly news bulletin some new power and relevance in an age of information clutter. It might be more expensive than hiring a lovely young thing with a bachelor of media studies and a nice white smile, but television news should be about more than pleasant diction and orthodontics.

This year, Americans are getting used to new faces behind the newsdesk. Within nine months, the big networks lost the anchormen who dominated screens for 30 years; Dan Rather of CBS, Peter Jennings of ABC and NBC's Tom Brokaw.

All were experienced, respected journalists who made it their business to be where the news was happening.

As well as reading the news, these men helped to create it. They were managing editors of their respective news operations; working with producers and reporters to shape the evening line-up, sending crews to breaking stories and arguing with network bean-counters about news priorities and budgets. They were equally likely to present the news wearing a grey suit in the studio as a sodden windcheater on the fringes of a hurricane, a flak jacket in a war zone, or - best of all - a tan trenchcoat atop the crumbling edifice of some fallen dictatorship.

This was news as it should be reported; by people who knew what they were talking about.

As well as impressive curriculum vitae, Jennings, Rather and Brokaw shared essential characteristics for great newsreaders; influence in the newsroom, longevity and big salaries.

If TVNZ wants to win the ratings in the long-term, it needs to accept that viewers respect and trust newscasters at the top of the game.

You get people like that only if you're prepared to lure them from other job options, and pay them enough to commit to the chair for 10 or 20 years.

Rather, a reporter whose experience included covering White House Administrations from Nixon to Clinton, reporting live from the scene of the Tiananmen Square massacre, the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, the Gulf and Iraq, retired from CBS after 24 years as anchor and managing editor in March, aged 73.

He had inherited the chair in 1981 from Walter Cronkite, a former war correspondent who had landed on the beaches of Normandy with the D-Day invasion, famous for breaking his impartiality by weeping while announcing JFK's murder.

Brokaw, who covered every presidential election since 1968, retired late last year after 21 years as NBC anchor and managing editor, during which time he reported live everywhere from Baghdad to Sudan.

And Jennings left his ABC post in April for cancer treatment, promising to return when he was well. He died, aged 67, in August, prompting the New York Times to publish an editorial mourning his loss and the end of the era of superstar anchors.

With his enormous experience as a foreign correspondent and war reporter, Jennings the anchorman "would use his considerable clout to get a news report on the air from some faraway place that Americans had never heard of, or one that could be hard to look at or difficult to understand", the editorial said.

"While the nation will adjust to a world without superstar network anchors like Mr Jennings, it can ill afford the loss of someone with his kind of influence behind the scenes."

TVNZ could probably ill afford the loss of Bailey, but it's too late for regret. The superstar system does not have to end with the departure of America's anchormen. This is a chance to continue and adapt their tradition, to give TV news in this part of the world the gravitas it deserves.