So now that the suspense is over and everyone knows that Katie Couric will leave NBC’s Today Show to take the anchor job at the CBS Evening News the question is: what does it mean?
Is it (as some suggest) The End Of TV News As We Know It or a smart adaptation to the fact that TV news is now operating in a totally new century — a century where more and more men don’t wear ties, the mid-20th century official-sounding announcers’ voices have been largely replaced by more informal younger voices and where it’s no big deal anymore for a woman to be on a newscast…or be seriously considered presidential material. The 20th century’s coveted broadcasting has given way to narrowcasting; people who want to write and opine and get a readerships no longer have to jump through corporate or educational hoops because they can create a weblog be their own editor/reporter/publishers.
It is a different world from the days when Walter Cronkite was chosen to be the anchor and from the days when CBS basically dumped Roger Mudd to bet its future news ratings and prestige on Dan Rather.
Vaughn Ververs looks at the significance of Couric’s move in detail on CBS’s superb CBS Public Eye blog. A small portion of his conclusion:
Whether the “Evening News� will attract more overall viewers with Couric at the helm is obviously an open question. I suspect it will, at least at first. The long-term audience picture is more important and that brings me to my final point. After the initial hoopla has all died down (and granted, we might be talking months here), all this probably means more to CBS than to broadcast journalism as a whole.
The technological changes – the Internet, iPod, on-demand video on multiple formats and things we’ve probably yet to see – are changing the nature of news in more profound ways than a new anchor ever could. It’s a changing landscape and everyone seems to be scrambling to figure it out and keep up. If Couric and a newer version of the “Evening News� fit into this new world, CBS will naturally benefit. In the end, the real test may well be the number of cell phone screens she appears on, not TV screens.
Indeed, nothing pundits can say ahead of time will obscure what happens when Couric finally takes the helm. There will be an initial large viewership. The task for CBS and Couric is to make sure the viewership stays and that word spreads that it’s a good program with a good anchor.
And, indeed, as Ververs points out, we’re in the infancy of this new century, with changes in many realms including technology, so just as early CBS news operations adapted to nationwide broadcasts and the advent of video cameras, Couric may be on the scene for changes in “venue” for her broadcast.
Our view? She’ll get a large audience at first. Some critics will be ready to pounce the second she opens her mouth and declare that it was a mistake because she’s not like Cronkite or Schieffer. But Couric does have a solid news background. And if viewers like what they see not just in style but in solid content, they’ll be back and at the very least she can preserve and build on the excellent (and to some early critics surprising) work Bob Schieffer has done in rebuilding the newscast’s audience after the era of the highly controversial Dan Rather.
And, perhaps, in the end journalism historians will view Schieffer as having presided over a kind of rebirth of the Walter Cronkite era for the broadcast….while Couric eases it into the 21st century with changes in style, content and technology.
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Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.