Katie's Moment

Network news audiences have been declining and growing older for two decades -- the average age is about 59 -- and the format has evolved only at the margins. The anchors travel more in this era of satellite technology, as Williams demonstrated with repeated visits to New Orleans, where he first covered Hurricane Katrina last fall. Elizabeth Vargas, co-anchor of ABC's "World News Tonight," who has been on her own since Bob Woodruff was injured in Iraq, does an afternoon webcast. All the newscasts run more health and medical pieces and longer stories under the rubric of "A Closer Look," CBS's "Eye on America" and "NBC News in Depth."

Tom Bettag, a former executive producer of the "CBS Evening News" and "Nightline," said it is "very hard" to change the nightly news because "there is a mandate to do the day's news. . . . Right now, the formula is to get through the news as quickly as you can and get to the in-depth segments that may or may not play off the day's news." Still, said Bettag, who now works for Discovery Networks, Couric is "a real pro" who could do a program "that is substantially different."

Lawrence Grossman, a former president of NBC News and PBS, praised Couric but agreed that it is "very hard" to break the evening news mold. "It's a 20-minute program and a lot of news has to be shoehorned in," he said. "Essentially, she's got to deliver the headlines, which is what it's been for the history of television and for radio before that. I hate to sound like an old fart, but that's the way it will remain."

Numerous women -- Campbell Brown, Diane Sawyer, Carole Simpson, Paula Zahn, Lesley Stahl and others -- have either anchored network newscasts on the weekend or substituted during the week. Three women -- Walters at ABC, Connie Chung at CBS and Vargas at ABC -- have been co-anchors. But no woman has flown solo on a permanent basis, and industry executives blame a lack of boldness in a male-dominated industry, along with concerns about whether women would be seen as authority figures in time of crisis.

Now, however, the club is getting larger. "It's great to welcome another woman to the evening news," Vargas said. "Katie is a first-rate journalist. The competition will make all of us even better."

Says Philly Inquirer columnist Gail Shister : "Some question whether Couric has the chops to make the transition from morning TV - where one can fry an omelette and interview the secretary of state in consecutive segments - to the rarified atmosphere of Big Three anchordom."

And get this: There's even a Katie poll, as if she were a presidential candidate or something:

"Asked if they would rather see Couric in her longtime role as "Today" host or as the first woman to anchor a network weekday evening newscast on her own, 49 percent favored the morning and 29 percent said evening, according to a poll conducted this week by The Associated Press and TV Guide."

Um, does this sentence strike you as a tad loaded?

"The woman who dressed in Marilyn Monroe and SpongeBob SquarePants outfits on Halloween and gave viewers a tour of her colon will take the position once held by the iconic Walter Cronkite and the ousted Dan Rather."

Hey, Ted Koppel once conducted an interview with Kermit the Frog.

The NYT's Alessandra Stanley , who's not a big Couric fan, reviews yesterday's show: