Ellen Gray | Busy Cynthia McFadden: Picture & sound

NIGHTLINE. 11:35 p.m. weekdays, Channel 6.

ASK CYNTHIA MCFADDEN how she balances her duties as a co-anchor of ABC's "Nightline" with those on ABC's "Primetime," and she answers: "Yikes."

"It's hard - I'm definitely overemployed at the moment," McFadden said in an interview last month during the Television Critics Association's meetings.

"It's really two full-time jobs. And I've been very busy because of the ["Primetime: Family Secrets"] series. I've had three hours on 'Primetime' in the last month. I'm getting sick of myself," she said.

McFadden's contributions to the "Secrets" series this summer included a late-June broadcast of her interview with Melanie McGuire, the New Jersey woman convicted of murdering her husband and dismembering his body, and two pieces in July, one an hour devoted to actor Daniel Baldwin's struggle with drug addiction and another hour focused on adoption.

If you stay up for "Nightline," you may have seen McFadden's interview Tuesday with Ann Romney, the wife of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, whom she pressed on the Romneys' stance against any stem-cell research that involves creating embryos, though Romney herself has a disease - multiple sclerosis - for which stem cells might contribute to a cure.

The Romney interview was as typical as any of McFadden's style, which tends to be down-to-earth.

In a medium in which women in particular are judged by their ability to walk the line between cloying and confrontational, McFadden, 51, manages to sound conversational.

But there's more to it than conversation: Is she concerned about spreading herself too thin?

"I worry about it all the time," McFadden said. But "I'm just as involved as I ever was in all the stories, so it just means there have to be 27 hours in a day. . . . And I have a 9-year-old [son Spencer] who I don't intend to miss growing up."

She started to expand on what she might do to cut her workload, but stopped herself. "You know, honestly? I have the best job in broadcasting," she said.

"I get to do this very interesting job on 'Nightline,' which is a wide swath of different kinds of reporting, and then I love the 'Primetime' hours. I mean, I loved my hour with Daniel Baldwin, looking at the addiction issue, I loved my hour . . . on adoption, a subject that's very near and dear to my heart [McFadden was adopted]. . . . So I think I just have to say no a little bit more often . . . and figure out how to pace them."

Like most news organizations, "Nightline" is online, with a Webcast hosted by correspondent John Donvan and a blog to which co-anchor Terry Moran appears to post sporadically (blogs.abcnews.com/terrymoran).

"I have to say I come late to it," McFadden acknowledged. "I know it's something the network's very interested in. . . . I would rather spend my time doing the documentary work, if I have a choice, and so far I have."

What she is interested in is occasionally leaving behind her camera crew.

"There's just some places you could go more easily if you were carrying the camera," she said.

"Because these tiny little cameras now are really broadcast quality. It's the audio that's a problem more than the picture. My first job in television was working for [former CBS president] Fred Friendly, who used to say that it's never the picture. People will watch bad pictures endlessly. But they can't bear to listen to bad sound," she said.

"Pictures, if it's bumping all over the place, now it's in." *

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