“CBS Evening News” anchor Katie Couric is expected to make it official this week: she will be leaving the “CBS Evening News” when her contract expires.
The announcement will likely come before CBS begins its “Evening News” coverage of the Royal Wedding from London later this week.
The New York Times‘ Brian Stelter also reports that CBS will announce “60 Minutes” correspondent Scott Pelley as her replacement in the first week of May.
Couric is expected to pursue a syndicated talk show to launch in Fall, 2012, likely with a major media company as a partner. Whether that company is CBS or NBC–the two big names batted around– remains to be seen.
Someone familiar with the matter says that interest in a Couric-led talker began in earnest last year, predating the ascension of Jeff Fager to chairman of CBS News in February.
Elsewhere, in his inaugural Newsweek column, Howard Kurtz speaks to Couric about her book, and leads with an anecdote of when she first started anchoring the CBS evening newscast:
Katie Couric kept having a dark fantasy that one of the New York City buses with her face splashed along the side would run her over, completing her demise. As CBS’s brand-new anchor five years ago, she was getting pummeled over everything from her wardrobe to her eye makeup to her alleged lack of gravitas, and “the very public vivisection was at times painful and hard to understand.” But, she says in a new book, she finally told herself: “Put on your big-girl pants.”