Couric May Take Pay Cut
The Daily Beast reports:
Katie Couric is feeling liberated.
Not because she is nearing the end of her five-year contract as CBS anchor—although there’s an unexpected plot twist on that front—but because she’s been spending less time in the studio. You can hear it in her voice.
“It’s great for me to get out of the chair and into the world, ” she says. “I started out as a reporter, and I still enjoy reporting.”
Rick Kaplan, her executive producer, says that “when she’s on the road—in Iraq with David Petraeus—she has a great way with people. People like her and she likes them. There are anchors who consider being on the road a pain in the butt. She really looks for opportunities to feel the earth and touch people.”
That’s why Couric has spent recent weeks in Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston and New Brunswick, New Jersey. She is touring what she calls “this great unwashed middle of the country” in an effort to divine the mood of the midterms.
Therein lies a key reason why Couric has sometimes struggled in her current job. She’s always seemed constrained by the rigid, 22-minute format, a far cry from her freewheeling Today performances over a decade and a half. So she has devised ways to slip out of her $15 million-a-year prison—launching a Web show, engaging on Twitter, and getting out in the field.
What she has learned on her latest excursions is that “American voters are slightly schizophrenic—they want compromise, and yet some of them are ideologically so fixated to one point of view… There are a lot of moderate Americans who are just fed up with negative campaign ads, fed up with the vitriol, fed up with the paralysis.”
