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Can you pick the Next Big News Star?

The contenders: Anderson Cooper, Elizabeth Vargas, Katie Couric and Charles Gibson.
(Photo credit: Illustrations by Joe Darrow) J onathan Klein, the boyish 47-year-old president of CNN, walks through the fourth-floor newsroom in the Time Warner Center with the supreme confidence of one who knows the Future of Television News will be reporting for duty down the hall in about ten minutes. And yet, as he later settles into his fifth-floor office, with a Central Park view on one side and a panel of TV screens on the other, Klein offers a more radical vision of the future of online casinos.

Hmmm, no anchors. That could be seriously bad news for a lot of good-looking men and women roaming freely around the Upper West Side; their lawyers, agents, and producers; and, of course, the newspaper and magazine reporters who devote their days to deconstructing the anchor business. Indeed, this may be the last magazine article you ever read about a TV news anchor. Enjoy it while it lasts.

hat follows is a rough estimation of events as they pertain to the matter of the Anchor Wars. Yes, these are the Anchor Wars, an extended covert operation that will cost combatants hundreds of millions of dollars and last even longer than Ted Koppel�s hair. The broadcast networks�ABC, CBS, and NBC�have all been forced, within a span of recent months, to contend with the loss of their longtime anchors. The death of ABC�s Peter Jennings from the ravages of lung cancer in August capped a nine-month period that included the retirements of NBC�s Tom Brokaw and CBS�s Dan Rather, plus a scandal surrounding a Rather story on