Word: couric
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...KATIE COURIC, CBS Evening News anchor, on fellow staffers at CBS who have taken anonymous potshots at her in the press...
Looks like ABC made the right pick. Of course, network news has a complex ecology. Couric may have been a poor fit, CBS's changes too major or too minor. Gibson may be doing well because Couric dislodged NBC fans who then sampled him, or because many ABC affiliates have Oprah before the local news...
Regardless, after all the money and attention spent on Couric, it will be much harder for a network exec to justify trying to widen the larger news audience. The journalistic lesson of Gibson's success and Couric's fizzling is that you can do well in the ratings with simple, unflashy news, and that's fine. But the business lesson is that trying to find new viewers--in the face of generational change, technological rivals and changing work and family schedules--to replace dying ones is pointless. TV-news analyst Andrew Tyndall, publisher of the Tyndall Report website, told...
...most news online or off cable, I think he's right. (Not just about TV news but most of the mass media.) But it's still sad to see TV news giving up on that dream, and the ambitions that go with it. It may be easy to mock Couric's palsy-walsy tone and Anchorman references, but at least she's trying to get new viewers' attention. Is change good for its own sake? In one way, yes. There's an intangible complacency that comes when you decide your mission is to slow your losses...
...Tyndall notes, the networks--which still have a bigger news audience than cable--may find a future online. But to make that transition, they'll have to be open to changing their flagship evening shows, even shrinking them by losing longtime viewers with shocks to the system like Couric. They may have to die a little to be reborn. I don't blame evening-news stalwarts for spending their evenings with Charlie. But if they love their network news, they should keep their fingers crossed for Katie...