To me the whole way that CBS (CBS-A) went about attaining and promoting Katie Couric pretty much set her and the network up for failure. Don't get me wrong, Couric is an adult and entered into the hype machine completely aware of what was going on.
But when you had the big money paid out for her announced before anything else, and then you talked about how her news show was going to be different from the others, it left no room for error. Yet errors were made.
The major mistake is the networks are only able to attract a certain amount of people to their news shows, as the viewers left watching are those that haven't made the change to consuming news on the Internet. So that meant from the beginning that the market couldn't be enlarged, but Couric would have to steal existing viewers from the competition. It never happened. Rather the opposite happened as people have abandoned her in droves.
When the $15 million-a-year anchor dropped to viewership of 5.9 million in the week ending May 25, it was an al-time low, and smaller than any of her predecessors ever saw. What that ends up coming to is $2.51 per viewer, said the New York Post.
In contrast, when you consider the salary of Brian Williams at the "Nightly News," his cost per viewer is only 55 cents each, and Charlie Gibson at "World News Tonight" costs 89 cents a head.
The cost of Katie Couric isn't simply in dollars though, but it is in judgement and leadership within the company. Of course people knew we'd be following her carefully, and so the network gets a lot of coverage that way, in spite of the numbers. But to not understand the underlying market forces that had already declared the overall abandonment of the nightly news by many of the Internet generation, was to believe in something that was an illusion, not a business decision based upon facts and trends.
In the end, because of her salary and the hype, Couric will probably be the big loser; but from the beginning this fiasco never had a chance to work.
It's too bad, because if they would have taken this slowly, and been more laid back in their approach, it may have been a good alternative to the type of news offered on the other channels. But we'll never know now. This project was stillborn before it ever began.
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