LOS ANGELES -- Sam Donaldson. Politics. The White House. Monica. Linux.
If that last word caught you by surprise, you're not alone. It caught Donaldson by surprise, too, when ABCNews.com general manager Bernard Gershon suggested that he give an Internet talk show a go.
"What I'm doing now is markedly different than anything I've ever done before," said Donaldson. His Samdonaldson@abcnews.com is a thrice-weekly webcast that launched on ABCNews.com at the end of September. "I'm a political reporter. I'm now talking about things I've never heard of."
At 65, the veteran ABC News reporter and anchor has become a true Internet believer, so taken with his subject that he's pitched boss Steve Bornstein, president of Disney's Go.com network, on the idea of taking his webcast to five days a week. Donaldson thinks he heard Bornstein say "Yes."
ABC "will have to decide that this is what they're paying my bloated salary for," Donaldson quipped.
Whether Bornstein -- or Bornstein's boss, Disney chairman Michael Eisner -- are ready to tilt Donaldson's contract obligations toward a program that clocks about 40,000 users on an average day remains to be seen. Bornstein was canvassing the floors of Jupiter Communications' first entertainment conference in Los Angeles and couldn't be immediately reached.
It's safe to say, though, that Samdonaldson@abcnews.com is only pulling in a tiny fraction of the people that shows like 20/20 and This Week with Sam Donaldson and Cokie Roberts do. (Donaldson is an anchor and correspondent on 20/20 and he co-anchors This Week). His 15-minute webcast runs Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 12:30 p.m. EST for 15 minutes.
Donaldson, as many political icons know all too well, is a hard guy to stop when he's on to something.
"Warren Buffet says one quality he looks for [in an executive] is that he's a fanatic. Sam is a fanatic," said Gershon. "That's what we bring to the Internet."
That hard-driving style and Donaldson's obvious fascination with a new subject, not his reputation, are the assets he brings to the webcast, Donaldson says.
"To say, 'This is the distinguished Sam Donaldson' doesn't cut it," he said. "These kids don't care. They're interested in high-tech, not Phil Gramm and the banking bill."
So Donaldson has gone where no political correspondent has gone before: inviting folks like Amazon.com's Jeff Bezos ("I knew vaguely who he was"), Real Networks' Rob Glaser, and Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart of the Eurythmics to appear as his guests.
It takes a lot more work, he says, than sitting down to interview a Washington insider. And it's frustrating, not knowing how to measure the show's success in a medium where his audience count is in the thousands.
But Donaldson is undeterred, believing that he is at the beginning of a grand journey on the Internet. "There are 6.5 billion people in the world," he said. "In my fondest dreams, I'd like to reach them all."
And will he be around long enough for that to happen? "Who knows?" he mused. "Mr. Wallace is 82 and he just signed a new contract."
