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Katie Took a Shot…So It Didn't Work Out
Steve Adubato, Ph.D.
MSNBC Media Analyst
So apparently change isn’t always so good. That’s the
best way to describe Katie Couric finally acknowledging in public
that the move to CBS to anchor the Evening News after a
stellar career hosting The Today Show may have been a mistake
after all. It’s funny, Katie doesn’t blame herself,
and she doesn’t say exactly why she’s not connecting
with the Evening News audience or why her broadcast is
a distant third to ABC and NBC. She just says; “People are
very unforgiving and resistant to change…The biggest mistake
we made is we tried new things.” Katie finally went public
in an in- depth interview with New York Magazine. If you
didn’t know any better, you’d think Katie was criticizing
the viewers and saying they just don’t appreciate good TV
because it isn’t what they’re familiar with.
While I respect Katie Couric tremendously as a broadcaster who
has had an impressive career doing personal profiles and engaging
interviews, this CBS experiment was a really long shot right from
the beginning. Simply put, Katie Couric is not a great news anchor
or an even particularly good news anchor, at least not a network
evening news anchor. That’s not a crime. A lot of great football
players can’t play baseball or basketball, but they are still
great athletes. That’s how different doing what Katie Couric
did on The Today Show was from what she was expected to
do for CBS News.
The other thing is that it wasn’t just the audience being
“very resistant” to change, as Katie says, it was the
fact that the change offered wasn’t very good. Right out of
the box, Katie and her producers made a big mistake with some of
their programming decisions. Doing a 60-90 second segment with people
(some known, some not) offering individual commentary or essays
was a high wire move with no compelling logic behind it. It was
a crapshoot. Some of these people we had heard of before, and others
who may have had something interesting to say didn’t know
how say it into a camera. This approach may have been fine for local
cable access or some cable news program trying to “break new
ground”, but for the CBS Evening News? It was just a bad idea,
which is why the audience never responded to it and why it was ultimately
scrapped.
And what was that whole thing about asking viewers to write in
to suggest how Katie should close the broadcast? Isn’t that
what we pay high priced producers and writers for in the world of
network news? I mean, the Internet is great, and we all love getting
interesting e-mail about our work on the air. But this was just
a cheap and not especially interesting gimmick. It was beneath such
an important network news broadcast with a long, distinguished history
of doing solid, hard news.
Look, competing in the evening news sweepstakes is not easy. Doing
it as the first women had to be especially difficult. But I’m
not convinced this is the reason the “Katie Couric Experiment”
didn’t work out. It wasn’t because of sexism, or that
people had it out for Katie. In fact, she’s a really likeable
person on- air. But I do think she and the bosses at CBS never really
thought through what this job would be and whether she was right
for it. It’s one of those things where a job sounds great
on paper because it’s impressive and you’ll get a lot
of attention by doing it. But the actual job itself really doesn’t
fit your skill set. The job really isn’t as interesting as
you thought it would be. You can’t really be that creative.
It’s a half hour broadcast about the news of the day with
22 minutes of actual news. The anchor’s job is to read news
copy, often written by someone else, and throw to a correspondent
in the field. Sounds simple enough, but to do it in a way that makes
it look easy and comfortable is the craft. Some people, like Brian
Williams and Charlie Gibson clearly have what it takes to do the
job. I just never saw Katie in this role, and obviously I am not
alone. The job never fit her skill set.
Then again, you might say, for 12 million dollars, who cares if
you’re having fun or being creative as long as your making
those check deposits every 2 weeks at the bank? But apparently Katie
Couric does care. She’s a professional, and this is embarrassing
on some level. She wanted to have fun, and she wanted to be herself.
She wanted to do well, and get ratings. And now she says in New
York Magazine, she sometimes asks; “Oh my God…what did
I do?”
You took a shot, Katie. And no one could criticize you for that.
But it just hasn’t worked out. You’re not going to the
poor house anytime soon, and you still have that 60 Minutes gig
to fall back on, as well as a great track record doing that other
gig on The Today Show. My advice? End the experiment now, don’t
drag it out any longer. It hasn’t worked for you, and it just
hasn’t worked for us.
Write to me why you think the “Katie Couric Experiment”
hasn’t worked out at Steve.Adubato@stand-deliver.com
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