Katie Couric to leave CBS Evening News

Music restored tonight and new headline inset trialled during the intro tease:

Now, every U.S. national evening bulletin copies NBC Nightly News' headline sequence.

In fairness ABC World News now have Diane standing in front of a large screen (is it some kind of projection? Seems very clear...) at the start, rather than using the on-screen graphics they'd previously used since she joined in 2009.

Titles now amended, no more 'WITH KATIE COURIC' strap, hideous music back.

Harry Smith live from Joplin, MO.

One headline on the intro tease then straight into the titles.

Are you watching on Sky News too, then? Glad you noticed the music too, thought it was just me at first. I wonder why they'd revert back to the old music over the weekend? Surely the theme and the voice over are on different sound tracks? I'd assumed they'd realised it was better that way...

The voice overs are definitely separate tracks and played out by the gallery independently, quite infuriating...

That's what I'd assumed too - especially noticeable when the US broadcasters do 'specials', such as "The death of Osama Bin Laden", when they use different voiceovers to the same tune. I just don't understand why they'd not carry the *awful* change at the weekend too!

Indeed, it's like CWilliams1976 has got a job at CBS!

Anyway, this is what they've done to the music

PROMO

That's a rather uncomfortably long hold on the end 'smiley' shot isn't it!

Drop the American flag. It's unnecessary, incongrous and reveals a confused program that doesn't know what it is. They set up the flag for their Election 08 coverage, and decided to keep it afterwards in the vain hope that Americans would be attracted by it to watch the newscast. It doesn't work like that. You want news? You go to a show that looks like the news. Having the US flag as the backdrop was just one more blunder.

The program looked, breathed and felt like 1993. By far the oldest-fashioned looking of the three newscasts, I thought Katie's purpose was to change or revolutionize evening news. People want more depth - they see headlines all day, yet the program stuck with its tired old format of including a myriad of 10-second, pointless stories that added nothing to people's understandings of the news.

Katie's scatterbrain approach to writing and to content didn't help either. She was all about Twitter this and Facebook that. Her daily YouTube notebook was a classic case - who on earth has time to sit there, load and watch a daily YouTube of Katie's random thoughts (from the very un -unprocessed setting of her coiffed, polished CBS News set, by the way) of dubious value of any sort? (Here's the tip - you should have written your web presence content, yes, like Brian Williams. Easily accessible and transferrable in perpetuity, posted insights would have been the more journalistic path. Katie, people want depth from network news. They want a place to go for analysis, for considered writing.

I hope CBS News looks at the big picture and makes the gutsy decision to steer this ship in the right direction.

Music still not reverted, as the voiceover was played the music dipped to the original pitch for a fraction of a second. I am beginning to wonder whether they know it's doing it.




Posters around the CBS Broadcast Center were changed 2 hours after Katie stepped down/went off air.

Couric joining ABC in 2012 to present Talk Show ....

(Christiane Amanpour on Twitter)