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When Katie Couric began anchoring The CBS Evening News early last month, her initial ratings were so strong -- she drew more than 10 million viewers -- that it appeared the former NBC Today star might buck network news tradition, catapult the third-place newscast into first place and keep it there.
But in seven weeks, talk that CBS News' $15-million-a-year anchor would be crowned the instant queen of the evening news has all but evaporated.
Initial viewer curiosity in Couric has worn off, a sign that popularity in the morning does not guarantee success at night. News has dropped from first to third place behind NBC Nightly News and ABC World News. Rival producers are talking much more confidently than they were last month.
Couric now faces a long slog to win fans, a traditional challenge for anchors at CBS and its rivals, network news experts and CBS executives say.
"Obviously no one wants to be No. 3, and I don't think we're going to be No. 3 for the duration, but it takes months and years to change viewer habits," says CBS News president Sean McManus. "We've said from Day 1 that our goal is to get a larger share of the 24 million people who watch an evening news program, and that's exactly what we are doing. If the perception is we should be growing faster, I'd like to, but the fact is we're not."
Says Evening News producer Rome Hartman, "We knew we'd have this huge sampling at the front end and then it would settle back down because evening news habits are hard to change."
In network news over the past 30 years, anchor changes have never resulted in an immediate boost in ratings, says Tom Rosenstiel of the Project for Excellence in Journalism. "There has never been a precedent for going from third to first, or even boosting ratings at all in a dramatic way."
Some may have expected Couric to be the exception, given her star power at Today, but that has not been the case. McManus notes that low-rated local newscasts leading into Evening News -- CBS' traditional handicap -- have also hurt Couric, just as they hurt anchor Dan Rather for years.
Local lead-ins are the "keys to success at 6:30 at night, and Couric's arrival hasn't changed that formula," says network news analyst Andrew Tyndall. "That's something that cannot be changed in a few months."
Rosenstiel says CBS raised expectations during the run-up to Couric's Sept. 5 debut by spending $13 million to promote the nation's first female solo anchor as a star who would bring a new sensibility to a revamped Evening News.
"CBS took the risk that a lot of people would tune in, there'd be a big curiosity factor and a lot of them would stick around," Rosenstiel says. "That hasn't happened. They've run some long passes, some breakout plays, and they haven't fully connected."
But "it's still a wide-open fight," says former Evening News producer Erik Sorenson. A key marker, he says, will be how Couric fares on her first major breaking story compared with rivals NBC's Brian Williams and ABC's Charles Gibson.
"Katie just hasn't been in the saddle of a major news event," Sorenson says. "Once that happens, that could change things for the better or for the worse."
Ratings for last week will be released Tuesday. For Oct. 9 to 13, CBS' newscast drew 7.3 million viewers, vs. NBC's 8.8 million and ABC's 8 million. But Couric drew about 400,000 more viewers that week than Bob Schieffer did a year ago -- a 6% rise -- and McManus notes that in two key demographic categories that advertisers measure, Evening News was up by double digits, while NBC and ABC were down slightly.
"From a financial standpoint, with numbers like that, it is a very prudent investment, spending $15 million on an anchor, that I can assure you," McManus says. "This is going to be a slow, gradual process. I'm much more concerned about (how Couric is faring) in 2007 and 2008 because that's when the success of this venture is really going to be manifested."
At NBC Nightly News, producer John Reiss says researchers predicted that Couric would draw curious viewers away from Nightly initially but that within a short period, "they would come back to us. I never want to declare 'game over,' but I like the trend lines. I like the way things are going."
At ABC World News, Gibson has been concentrating on putting his stamp on the broadcast he inherited in May, says producer Jon Banner. "He's much more comfortable on the broadcast than when he started," says Banner. "Obviously, some of the extreme sampling (of Couric) has slowed down, but I have a feeling this needs to play out for a longer time."
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