Bury
Donvan
Koppel
ABC News' "Nightline" unveiled its post-Ted Koppel tagline -- "Nowhere Else" -- and named its correspondents, including former "60 Minutes Wednesday" correspondent Vicki Mabrey.
Also named primary correspondents were "Nightline" veterans Chris Bury and John Donvan. ESPN's Jeremy Schaap will contribute occasional sports segments to the show, which bows its first episode without Ted Koppel on Monday.
The three will join anchors Martin Bashir, Cynthia McFadden and Terry Moran; longtime "Nightline" correspondents Dave Marash and Michel Martin are leaving the show.
The cast is in place, and executive producer James Goldston said work on the show's street-level Times Square studio is finished. Program will be hosted by McFadden and Bashir live from New York City, where Goldston said he hopes to tap into some of the energy on the street at 11:35 p.m., when the show airs.
"We're asking the 'Nightline' audience to accept quite a lot of change," he said. "There's an assumption that change by its nature means the show won't be as good as it was before, that it will become a tabloid show. I refute this utterly."
Goldston said the show, which will feature three topics per night, will employ some of the promotional tricks well known to magazine-show viewers, including segment teases and highly produced introductions.
"It has never been a show to promote itself in the way it presents to an audience ... but in this increasing multichannel world, you have to make a song and dance about your material," Goldston said.
While show is hosted out of New York, and eight employees have been added in Gotham, Goldston stressed that the majority of the production work would remain in D.C.
"Nightline" has six dedicated production suites in ABC News' Washington bureau, compared with two in New York, which reflects roughly how much production work will occur in the two locations.
Koppel's final broadcast tonight will look back on some of his favorite segments over nearly 26 years at the show, including "Morrie: Lessons on Living," the story of Morrie Schwartz, a retired Brandeis sociology professor who was dying of Lou Gehrig's Disease.
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