Katie Couric: The Anachronistic Anchor

Rebecca Dana at The Wall Street Journal broke the news overnight that CBS Evening News anchor Katie Couric is "likely" to leave the network before her contract expires in 2011, possibly as soon as January of 2009.

Couric has certainly failed to live up to the hype that accompanied her ascension to the anchor chair in the fall of 2006. The settled formulas of the network nightly newscast proved harder to reinvent than she and her first executive producer Rome Hartman expected. CBS' decade-long third place in the ratings proved especially stubborn to shake off. The hoopla surrounding her arrival--a new set, a new logo, her shattering of that glass ceiling, her face plastered on the side of buses next to Dr Phil--provided an evanescent boost to CBS' ratings, prompted more by curiosity than superior journalism.

But these problems hardly constitute Couric's failures so much as the burden of unrealistically high expectations. There was once a time, when broadcast television networks had monopoly power, that ratings problems could be solved by throwing multimillion dollar contracts at celebrity journalists. Roone Arledge, the mentor of CBS News President Sean McManus, was the master of this technique, assembling a roster of Peter Jennings and Diane Sawyer and Barbara Walters and David Brinkley and Ted Koppel back in the 1980s. But this is the 21st century. Mass media sized audiences are never returning to broadcast television, so celebrity solutions for solving shrinking ratings no longer apply.

Couric can hardly be blamed for pocketing the enormous check, $15m or so each year, that CBS News thrust upon her. CBS News certainly made an error in making her the offer. And she certainly cannot be faulted for not working as hard as her rivals. At Tyndall Report we logged almost as many reports filed by Couric at CBS in the past 18 months as by Charles Gibson at ABC (97 v 116) and many more than Brian Williams' 57 at NBC.

The 21st century task facing an organization like CBS News is to leverage its still substantial broadcast television presence, exploiting its promotional clout and accompanying resources, in order to increase its audience on all other platforms. All the growth CBS News can look forward to will be away from television, as we watch our video news on our cell phones, our PlayStations, our computer screens, on YouTube, via shared as e-mails and embedded players so on.

It is a delicious irony that the oldest and most staid news formula on television--the half hour evening newscast--happens to be composed of video packages, each two minutes or so in duration, that are the ready made unit for modern day YouTube video viewing. There are only two differences between those video packages strung together in a newscast and available individually online: on television they are interrupted by youth-repelling commercials for pharmaceuticals and other wrinkle-targeted products; second that guiding hand of an anchor introduces each piece. Online viewers are liberated from Big Pharma and Big Anchor.

Reported hard news from global hotspots and the corridors of power has always been the bread and butter content of the nightly news. The newscasts have always been a correspondents' and producers' medium, the journalists on the scene covering the day's events, with the anchor playing a secondary, facilitating role. As that news shifts from broadcast television to multiplatform video, the on-the-scene content becomes yet more prominent and the anchor's role recedes yet further.

CBS News never needed an anchor to increase its audience; instead it needed an aggressive online strategy. And if hard news is key to that strategy, the last type of anchor it needed was an expensive celebrity whose major skills were those of a morning show interviewer and whose favorite news beat was human interest.

Comments

[lazlogasky]

I have high respect for Cour5ic just bcoz I've seen her broadcast and realized that it isn;t bad as anyone thought... it's actually better than ABC and NBC and Couric speaks with more heart. More power Katie!!

Katie we'll see you in the Evening News for more years to come!

[DeanLowe]

What are you people talking about?
Real journalists don't belong behind a desk.

[InofTouch]

So then Dan Rather?

[AlFeldzamen]

1. Ugly
2. Horrible, screechy voice
3. Not a journalist at all

Now, I'd bet Martha Teichner, of the splendid Sunday Morning (CBS News show) would be a tremendous hit as the nightly news anchor.

[WilliePilgrim]

Anachronistic? I wish. To my minds eye, an anachronism literally would be a news presenter who did their job without the implied emotional loading that accompanies the current crop of self-celebrating de-facto celebrities masquerading as journalists.
An anachoronism would be a return to the days when news departments were a part of the public affairs programing that FCC license holders did in return for their licenses to broadcast on the public's airwaves...or as it was frequently acknowledged, their license "to print money"....now, news is just a lead-in to the evenings "must see TV" and "or-else" profit center for the corporate owners of the broadcasters themselves.
Ah...for the good old days.

[longislandlol]

There's a brilliant anchor on CNN named Kagan-- I forget her first name- she's insightful, intelligent, and she's private- no celebrity- we don't want celebs-- bring in the Ms. Kagan's, and others of her genre-- most of them are already at CNN-- CNN knows how to pick substance over fluff--

[coolkraft]

always liked Charles Scheffer....he is a real news anchor, intelligent, well read, pleasant,b­elievable.­..I stopped watching when they brought in lightweight Couric....she has always annoyed me...I would have liked a woman or man with some substance not fluff....

[Skyhawk]

Make Lara Logan the new anchor. She has the creds.

[DennyCrane]

"The newscasts have always been a correspondents' and producers' medium, the journalists on the scene covering the day's events, with the anchor playing a secondary, facilitating role."

Bob Schieffer understood this better than anyone. When he took over for Dan Rather, he did it with class. He never made himself the centerpiece of the broadcast, but let the other correspondents carry the show. CBS should've stuck with him instead of hiring Couric.

[Durango]

Instead of hiring a celebrity for $15 very large CBS should have hired a couple dozen reporters and stationed them around the world.

What do viewers want out of a newscast? News. How about giving it a try? Reporters, reporting on events happening around the world. No more nightly segments on the most recent medical miracles. No more soft, feel good pieces.

News. Hard news. News that challenges the viewers. News that is intelligent. That's what people want. Not celebrity pablum.

For reference see:The Daily Show.

[JJK]

I don't get it. I have very little (some, but very little) experience dealing with members of the "national media." Otherwise, I'm usually sitting way up in the cheap seats, snarfing down my popcorn, while the punditocrats, talking heads and news readers dispense or recite their wisdom in ever shorter News Cyles.
Katie Couric's entire tenure at CBS, starting with her long goodbye from the Today Show, through the insufferable spin over the "new set" that was being designed for her, up to her initial "Hi There" (or whatever) and through the devolution of her abysmal ratings was a classic, slow-motion, train wreck.
What I don't get is that if it was obvious to me from my view in the cheap seats that Ms. Couric would fail, and miserably so, as an anchor (I said so well before she left NBC), how did anyone in his or her right mind, who was being paid big bucks for presumably having some expertise in these matters, ever think that the friendly, iconically "perky" voice of early morning America would be able to transition to the evening news and its audience?

[SunnyJohn]

Maybe the same kind of people who thought George Bush would be a competent president...

[JJK]

OMG. Are you suggesting they were THAT dumb?

[LeonBNJ]

Unlike in the past, the major networks are all part of media groups that now require all divisions, including news, to be profitable. The big 3 networks are also no longer the only video coverage of news, with the rise of the cable 3, CNN, Fox News and MSNBC. CBS tried to get attention and by that better ratings and income by paying huge money to a celeberty for their nightly news program with Couric. Problem is that doesn't work any more and thus CBS wasted a lot of money that could be better spent on working journalists. It looks like soon that CBS News will be largly outsourced to CNN soon anyway, so time to find someone who will be the evening anchor for maybe $200,000/year. I am quite sure they would have no problem finding a person to do it at that price.

[Antisana]

It is not just Couric, all the rest of the Nightly news Anchors are merely robotic readers of the news feed prepared by newswriters. The American news consuming public has taken a new look at their willingness to view the "news" as we now know it. Get with it ABC, CBS and NBC, the public appetite and consumption for real news has shifted forever.

[Antisana]

Andrew, Good post. The reality is the NBC, CBS and ABC nightly news is passe, done and over with. The American Consumer has traveled to a new plane. The sooner the out-moded networks get it, the better off will be their shareholders. Otherwise, they will go the same way as the industrial relics of our past, ie. Bethlehem Steel, Chrysler, etc.

[RogerHWerner]

Couric's mistake was believing that she is a journalist and I don't mean that as negatively as it sounds. Look...CBS news: Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite, and Dan Rather...like or hate them but these guys were honest to God journalists. Add Couric's name to this list and does anyone see an incongruity? Couric is a television personality who cut her teeth doing interviews concerning human interest stories. There's a place for such people but to sell them as journalists does a disservice to journalism.

[StrayTalk]

I do remember when she worked for NBC and called herself Katherine Couric during the first Gulf War. She was an anchor in the field and seemed to me to do a pretty good job. Not everyone is cut out to be an anchor. Me, I'm probably biased but I would rather see Keith Olberman doing the nightly news say at a somewhat later time than 6:00 or 6:30

[StrayTalk]

Sorry, meant to say REPORTER in the field.

[PioneerKing]

The vapid Mrs. Couric milked the money cow quite nicely and may now be put out to pasture.

[RogerHWerner]

Yes she did and guess what? You would have done the same thing and so would have I. And so would virtually everyone else.