Wallace Back To NBC Front Office
Epstein takes over as executive producer of Nightly News
By Marisa Guthrie -- Broadcasting & Cable, 12/8/2008 2:14:00 PM
Alex Wallace, who has been the executive producer of Nightly News with Brian Williams since March 2007, will return to the NBC News executive team where she will be number two to Steve Capus, president, NBC News.
Bob Epstein, formerly the senior broadcast producer on Nightly, has been upped to EP.
The move comes on the heels of SVP Mark Whitaker’s decamping to become NBC News Washington bureau chief, a position left vacant by the untimely death last June of Tim Russert.
Wallace retained her front office title when she was at Nightly with the assumption that she would at some point return to a full-time oversight role.
“I need somebody who I can trust and who has rock solid fundamentals,” said Capus. “And I would have said that about Alex two years ago when she was here.
Nightly had been in a close race with ABC's World News with Charles Gibson for the No. 1 evening news program. Nightly is expected to finish the year ahead of World News in total viewers. Season to date, Nightly is ahead in the 25-54 demographic by about 200,000 viewers.
For Wallace, the exigencies of running a nightly news program were decidedly different from the macro issues in the front office.
“I have had more time to think today than I’ve had in 21 months,” she said during a phone interview on Monday. “It’s kind of nice to be able to sit back and think about things.”
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