Katie Couric said if she knew CBS (CBS-A) was going gravitate to a more traditional news broadcast, the anchor job would have been much less appealing than when she originally accepted. She added that if she had known this was going to happen, "...It would have required a lot more thought."
"People are very unforgiving and very resistant to change," Couric said in an interview. "The biggest mistake we made is we tried new things."
I can't agree with Couric on that last comment, saying the biggest mistake was trying new things. The biggest mistake to me was not understanding that the Internet has changed the way people consume news. When the announcement came that Couric had been hired to anchor the CBS Evening News, there was a overall collective yawn.
It wasn't related to Couric personally, but rather to the way people were now consuming their news online; at least in the younger demographic.
So that means that the battle over viewers is with a predetermined number that wasn't going to change one way or the other. All that's happened is a redistribution of where people are viewing, not growing the overall audience.
Having said that, trying new things was a problem because of the demographic being served. They've been socialized so long in what is called hard-news, that they couldn't quickly respond to the new way of doing things. In truth, I wish CBS would have given this a much longer commitment than they did. People may have started to gravitate to that style. Now we'll never know.
With Couric already not liking the direction things are going, it's probably an early signal that she'll be gravitating away from the newscast.
She said, "If it turns out it wasn't a perfect fit, then, you know, I'll do something else that's really exciting and fulfilling for me."
There are times she says when she wished she hadn't made the move to CBS. Not a good sign that things are going to keep on going for her as the news anchor.
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