Why Evening News Anchors No Longer Matter

From  Jack Shafer, slate.com

[Katie] Couric's great misfortune was to become a broadcast network news anchor just as we were entering the post-anchor period. By post-anchor I don't mean that you could plop just any Arnold Zenker (article purchase required) into the studio and squeeze a good performance out of him. But the job and the audience aren't what they were when John Chancellor, Walter Cronkite, Tom Brokaw, and even Peter Jennings walked the earth. The explosion of news choices on cable and the Web have made the evening news an anachronism enjoyed mostly by an audience of older and less highly educated viewers, according to the Project for Excellence in Journalism. If there is little prestige, honor, and future being the anchor of the No. 1 show chasing an audience that is growing smaller, older, and is less-educated, imagine how the No. 3 anchor must have felt.

Couric drew stellar ratings in her opening weeks as anchor, largely because the hype machine stoked so much interest in the first female to fly solo on an evening newscast. But then the aging creatures of habit who still tune in the nightly news returned to their previous routines, and Couric and CBS slumped to third once more.

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