Andrea Thompson gave up a high-profile acting career to become a television reporter in New Mexico. Robert Sullivan reports on her new life (sans costume designers).

Good evening, and welcome to tonight's View report. Here is a look at one of the stories we'll be covering...

You probably know Andrea Thompson best as Jill Kirkendall, the tough-as-nail detective on NYPD Blue. Well, Andrea recently traded in her set-side folding chair in Hollywood for a small desk in an Albuquerque TV newsroom. Is she merely preparing for an upcoming role as a TV journalist? Not at all. In face, according to Andrea, the career transition is the fulfillment of a lifelong dream. We'll be looking at exactly how Andrea is doing on her switch from fiction to nonfiction specifically, with respect to her look.

But first let's go live to Andrea herself, who has just finished giving a quick tour of the KRQE News 13 station and is now on the roof of the station. Andrea highlights the view from the roof as if it were a weather map; the cluster of high-rises that is downtown Albuquerque, the cool blue desert sky through which a faraway rainstorm threatens to arrive in time for the five o'clock report. She nods toward the satellite-dished building of the rival news station; she buzzing with competition. ("Right now, we're number three in the market," she says of the KRQE News 13 team, "but not for long!") As the wind blows through her cropped hair, as it brushes her pale blue Tahari suit, Andrea throws out a not-so-hard-hitting question, and out imaginary microphone moves in for the sound bite; "It's beautiful, isn't it?" she says.

After the tour, Andrea hustles back to her desk, and the slightly trembling, hand-held View camera is now panning across the newsroom, which is a cavernour place where TV monitor circle the ceiling like electromagnetic wainscoting. Whereas previously Andrea might have spent her pre-on-set time in a trailer with a wardrobe assistant and a makeup-person and a bottle of slightly chilled spring water, her desk at KRQE News 13 is situated plein air, back-to-back with the desk of Darren White, a big-shouldered guy who made over his life by turning reporter after being, as he puts it, the state's top cop for years. The View camera lingers over Andrea's desk-- strewn with documents, a copu of Strunk and White's The Elements of Style, a thin of Altoids, a collection of Hemingway's newspaper dispatches--then follows Andrea as she runs to look over footage of an Albuquerque Internet romance gone bad. "It's local news," she says, wearing headphones and scribbling on her legal pad. "It's seat-of-your-pants." Later, she adds, "I think of it as the real deal."

Finally, Andrea ducks outside the studio for a break, when we catch her and talk about her life transition as it pertains to her career and--as we are, after all, conductiong a View report here-- as it pertains to her personal style. Andrea reminisces about her childhood interest in journalism (her mother encouraged her to model), abouther days as an actress--first on Falcon Crest, then on Jag, then on NYPD Blue. The View camera is very still now; it comes in tight on Andrea, speaking in clipped sentences--fast, like she's on deadline, which she is. Why the switch? the View reporter asks.

"I think I was watching the news and I thought, I should be doing this-- and I began to have more of an emotional response from that," she says.

How's it going so? "It's the hardest job you'll ever do," she says, adding, "It's great."

Andrea flew into Albuquerque last May, just in time to help cover the raging wildfires that jeopardized New Mexico's (not to mention the nation's) nuclear facility at Los Alamos. Within hours of getting her press pass, she found herself miles from town, walking up to strangers and asking them questions about life and death. She managed to distinguish herself during the local and national coverage of the fires with a report on a flame-retardant chemical that is found in disposable diapers and used in a commercail flame retardant recommended for New Mexico homes in the path of the wildfires--a report that featured Andrea failing to ignite a pair of Pampers with a blowtorch.

Her co-workers talk for the record. "Her stories aren't perfect yet," says her boss, Dan Salamone, as if he were a gruff-but-kind news director on a TV series about a station. "But most of the time she's making them go around some human angle." Heargues that the journalism experts who say Andrea is not qualified to become a reporter are being elitist. "There are bartenders out there," he says, nodding toward his newsroom. "There are disk jockeys out there. There are clerks from Blockbuster." He points out that she is starting on the ground floor. "It's not like she left NYPD Blue and went straight to MSNBC," he says, adding, "She has all the enthusiasm of a college graduate coming out of journalism school, yet all of the maturity of a woman who has had her ups and downs and seen a lot of life's struggles." A few of Andrea's supporters believe that her celebrity has actually helped her as fas as news gathering goes in that people seem to recognize her. This can be useful to a reporter, especially in rural areas where the local residents are sometimes reluctant to discuss current events on the air and are sometimes armed.

Fashion wise, the new job is a big change. "It's the first time in my life that I've owned something, because for 20 years as an actor I showed up in jeans and they dressed me," Andrea says. What she used to wear at work varied. On Falcon Crest, for example, she wore, in her quick-fire words, "push-up bra... everything tailored... lots of lingerie..." On NYPD Blue and JAG, se wore various uniforms, such that the attention she put into what she wore to work day to day was minimal. "I'd show up to work in a cowboy boots and jeans and a big T-shirt because you knew you were just going to rip it off."

She leans back, jacketless for the moment, wearing a plain white T-shirt in the New Mexico heat. "I mean, I used to wear no underwear because I knew I'd have to take that off," she says, offering this particular View reporter more than he perhaps needed to know. Speaking of undergarments, Andrea has noticed a difference in the fashion climates of Albuquerque and L.A. "California is really a permissive environment. If someone's wearing underwear on the street you don't give it a second thought. Here I wouldn't even go braless. Meanwhile, it's over 100 degrees, and I would dearly like to run around without a bra."

These days, she is into Emporio Armani, not just for its sleekness but also for its not-too-revealing-ness. She insists on not wearing anything that might distract viewers. "You have to be careful about what you wear," she says. "Otherwise, somebody will say, 'Hey, look at her breasts!' I generally wear button-down shirts." Andrea's idea of an ensemle to wear for, say, an in-front-of-the-courthouse live shot goes like this. "Emporio Armani, off the rack. Nice, tailored pants. You don't want anything too tight or provovative. Nice, mid-size heelspumps. Nothing with a narrow heel. You have to be able to run."

And yes, Andrea is aware of the stereotypical fashion portrait of the average TV news personality, that she may be considered on the edge with respect to the state of affairs in Southeast Asia, but several seasons behind the game in terms of cutting-edge hairstyles ("People always make jokes about newscasters," she says). Andrea notes the few exceptions--she is impressed with Diane Sawyer's heels and vows to take all the fashion advice that the image consultant gives her with a grain of salt. To wit, she will not be wearing earrings that are between a nickle and a quarter in size, as recommended. She has stuck with her modest little diamond posts.

Apparently, the biggest change in her personal-appearance habits has to do with time. Whereas Hollywood allotted for look preparation, the New Mexico news beat does not. Therefore while out in the field, Andrea remains constantly prepared for spur-of-the moment on-camera appearances. Her car, a Volvo sedan, does quadruple duty as a kind of dressing room/library/emergency-supply cache, replete with foul-weather gear, maps, papers, Clif Bars, and various types of boots. "You have to have your makeup bag with you at all times because no matter how crappy things get, you have to look good."

And on This Week in Andrea Thompson's New Career in Journalism she does, in fact, look good. She looks good to the discerning View camera and to KRQE News 13 viewer throughout the greater Albuquerque area. She looks good and she looks professional, such as when she covers the Albuquerque police. It is a short piece, maybe two minutes long, about cold cases--that's police talk for the murder investigations that are at seeming dead ends. She interviews the teary relatives of long-ago murder victims; she interviews the cops, frustrated by lack of time and money and manpower. She reads her straightforward sentences. At the end of the report, she turns to the news camera. "This is a dedicated group of cops," she says. And she says it in a way that makes the View reporter and the viewer at home believe that she is not making it up. And now back to you.