For whatever reason, Katie Couric keeps on coming up in the media news. The latest attempt to justify her performance is that the average age of people viewing her newscast has dropped by one year since she started. Big deal.
The median age of those watching the Evening News is now 60, in contrast, World News Tonight and Nightly News both have an average age of 61 watching them.
This is all happening because broadcast news is now a commodity. It serves the basic same audience, and that won't change for some time to come.
Advertisers don't really care much about who is anchoring a news channel other than how many people are watching. When anchors change, it simply rearranges the same viewers who may prefer someone else; something they did as they left Katie in droves.
People are trying to prop her up because she has done so poorly. But like we've talked before here, it's because of the huge, salary that she won't be earning during her stay. Of course you can't blame her for that, CBS (CBS-A) made the decision.
Trying to find some type of silver lining in the fact that she is at record lows for the news program only shows someone out there's desparately trying to find something to boast about. That in itself isn't a good sign.
To me it would be better to have as little publicity about Katie Couric as possible and let her quietly go about doing her job. The experiment and expectations have obviously failed. It would be better to try some different things quietly and see if they can draw some viewers over from the other two news broadcasts, then to continually dig as deep as they can to find something to justify their poor decisions.
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