The point was so important that Diane Sawyer was compelled to make it twice during a "Primetime" episode on battling stepfamilies.

"You want reality TV?" she asked. "Tonight, you get it. Starting now."

The appeal couldn't be any more plain, or plaintive. Broadcast network newsmagazines are at a low ebb — with likely even fewer hours on the air next season — and the popularity of reality television is chiefly to blame.

The struggle at newsmagazines to compete with this threat seems ultimately what's behind some stories that drew unwanted attention during the past month. "Dateline NBC" raised ethical questions by paying an outside organization to set up a sting operation for pedophiles. Sawyer's April 21 "Primetime" featured a stepfamily so abusive it seemed like "Supernanny" spun out of control, with tape of a father punching his teenage daughter. ABC was criticized for not alerting authorities.

Newsmagazines have "morphed into something that is farther away from news and much closer to entertainment," said Joe Foote, acting dean of the University of Oklahoma's journalism school. "They're a long way from their roots."

Newsmagazines still mix in some quality reporting, Foote said. These stories are almost secondary to the need for glitzy material that can be highly promoted — like a "20/20" interview with Tom Cruise from the set of his latest movie.

And the humanitarian crisis in Darfur is more likely to be seen in prime-time through Angelina Jolie's eyes (Ann Curry's recent interview on "Dateline NBC") than in enterprise reporting.

They're also a long way from their peak. "60 Minutes" is the only newsmagazine to routinely draw more than 10 million viewers a week; four separate newsmagazine hours accomplished that just five years ago.

"Dateline NBC," on for five hours a week in the late 1990s, will lose its Sunday edition during football season next fall. Its other regularly scheduled episode was moved to Saturday, broadcast television's dead zone.

There's a very real chance that either "Primetime" or "20/20" won't be included when ABC announces its fall schedule.

"I think the audience feels that the real-life drama that was the bread-and-butter of magazine shows was supplanted by the artificial reality of reality television," said Susan Zirinsky, executive producer of "48 Hours Mystery" on CBS.

Newsmagazines once filled the networks' need for relatively cheap prime-time programming to counter expensive comedies and dramas. Reality now does this, with the added advantage of having the potential to become a big hit if all the stars align.

With the notion of public service all but gone, newsmagazines now compete with entertainment programming.

Zirinsky's "48 Hours Mystery," which has bucked the trend by showing higher ratings on Saturday nights, is usually a one-hour crime drama, sort of like a real-life "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation."

She doesn't even call it a newsmagazine anymore.

"I consider ourselves a reality drama that has the ability to jump if news warrants," she said.

"60 Minutes" is considered the gold standard, but it's not immune to pressure to make a show that has the oldest prime-time audience more attractive to young people. "60 Minutes" has also lost nearly 2 million viewers over the past five years, and there's some nervousness at CBS about whether NBC's new Sunday night football franchise will reduce that audience further in the fall.