Who

Formerly the perky co-host of Today, Couric is now the much less perky anchor of the CBS Evening News, the last-place evening newscast.

Backstory

A Virginia native and UVA sorority girl, Couric began her television career as a desk assistant in ABC News's Washington bureau in 1979. She gradually worked her way up to on-air reporting, with stints at local stations in Miami and D.C., before joining NBC as deputy Pentagon correspondent in 1989. The following year she joined Today as a national correspondent and filled in for Deborah Norville when she left the show on maternity leave in 1991. When audiences quickly cottoned to her girl-next-door cheeriness, Today producers officially swapped Norville with Couric as co-anchor.

Couric spent six years sitting alongside Bryant Gumbel before earning a new couch-mate in 1997 when Matt Lauer became co-anchor, and filled the airwaves with peppiness during Today's golden age when the show became a ratings and advertising bonanza under executive producer Jeff Zucker. By 2006, though, she'd apparently grown tired of the early morning routine and with Good Morning America gaining ground on the Today franchise, she skipped out of studio 1A to move to CBS to take over the evening newscast, which Bob Schieffer had been interim-anchoring since Dan Rather's inglorious departure in mid-2005. Publicly, Couric said she was thrilled to return to hard news and inherit one of the most prestigious jobs in television. Critics immediately zeroed in on her outsized paycheck as the primary motivation. Whatever it was that led her to CBS, she made her awkward debut on September 5, 2006.

Of note

CBS pulled out all the stops to promote their pricey new hire and both CBS brass and Couric promised that the new show would turn the idea of evening news on its head: Katie would inject some AM-style chattiness into the traditionally stodgy 6:30pm newscast, network publicists said; she'd bring over the housewives she'd won over on Today and vault the program from last place to first, CBS execs assured advertisers. Things didn't work out at all as planned, of course.

After a brief ratings pop, viewers started tuning her out and it quickly became clear that audiences had no interest in seeing the formula change, at least not the changes CBS instituted, which included touchy-feely segments like "freeSpeech," wherein celebrities expounded on issues near and dear. CBS scrambled to restyle the show along more traditional lines: Katie's original sign-on phrase, the high-spirited "Hi, everyone," was scuttled in favor of the comparatively stiff "Hello." The program's executive producer was dumped, and CBS embarked on a series of publicity stunts to boost ratings, such as a trip to the frontlines in Iraq in September 2007, designed to burnish Katie's hard-news image. But ratings continued to sag and Katie remained a distant third behind ABC's Charlie Gibson and NBC's Brian Williams.

Although CBS chief Les Moonves had greeted Katie's arrival with giddy enthusiasm, it was quickly becoming apparent that the high-priced hiring had been a colossal misstep. CBS News staffers, unsurprisingly, turned bitter. Couric's diva-like antics—combined with the widespread impression that she was dragging down the entire news division—soon led vengeful staffers to gripe to the tabloids that her days were numbered. A July 2007 New York cover story about Couric, wherein she baldly confessed that moving to CBS was a mistake, undermined her, as did the August 2007 publication of Ed's Klein's Katie: The Real Story, which offered the grim assessment, "There is no elegant way out for Katie Couric."

After more than 18 months of embarrassment, it's now clear that the end is at last near: In early 2008, it was reported that Couric, Moonves, and CBS News chief Sean McManus had been having talks about ending her tenure at Evening News and creating some sort of new vehicle for her within the company, such as a daytime show a la Oprah or a Larry King-like prime-time interview program. At any rate, the merciful conclusion to this disastrous chapter in her career is expected to finally arrive in February 2009, shortly after the presidential inauguration.

By the numbers

A good deal of the animosity within CBS stemmed from Couric's exorbitant pay package: Moonves offered her between $15 million to $22 million a year to lure her to CBS, depending on which reports you believe. More resentment followed the revelation that some of Katie's haul was siphoned from other CBS News employees' paychecks: Lesley Stahl, for example, was forced to accept a $500,000 pay cut after Katie signed on.

Personal

Couric married Jay Monahan, a lawyer and legal analyst for NBC News, in 1989. They had two children—Elinor (Ellie) and Caroline (Carrie)—before Monahan died of colon cancer in 1998 at the age of 41. Since then, Couric has been linked to plastic surgeon Carroll "Cap" Lesesne, TV producer Tom Werner, and musician Chris Botti. She's currently dating D.C. businessman (and divorced father of two) Jimmy Reyes, who was once engaged to radio talk show host Laura Ingraham. Katie and her daughters live on Park Avenue at 92nd Street, and spend weekends at a 7,000-square-foot house in East Hampton that she purchased for $6.3 million in 2006.

Pet cause

Monahan's death prompted Couric to become a major fundraiser and spokesperson for colon cancer research. (Perhaps you remember her on-air colonoscopy in 2000?) She's since founded The Jay Monahan Center for Gastrointestinal Health at New York-Presbyterian.