Katie Couric: Can the former TV newscaster make it as a talk show host?

“Could Oprah come back in this market? Could Phil Donohue? Even Geraldo has gone to radio,” he says.

 Besides what the move says about TV audiences and tastes, analysts will be looking to see what it means for Couric, who may have to reinvent herself after five years as CBS anchor.  

Couric tried to liven up the format of CBS Evening News, but she was never able to lift it out of third place behind NBC and ABC. The others widened their ratings leads even as her broadcast won several awards, including four Emmys.

"Katie Couric’s effort to establish herself as a serious journalist will be instantly undercut when she hosts a TV talk show that covers a gamut of front-burner subjects all the way from gray hair to ‘Shades of Grey,’ a stable of suburban reading groups seeking soft-core stimulation,” says Ben Agger, director of the Center for Theory at the University of Texas in Arlington. “If one of her first guests will be Jessica Simpson, we can expect a Kardashian soon.”

Agger posits his own personal opinion as a way of showing the barrage of judgment that is likely to come her way.

“Perhaps I unfairly dislike the talk-show genre and I should stop being a snob. Or perhaps I used to like Katie and I’m disappointed in her philistinism,” he says. “We project unrealistic expectations onto cultural icons; maybe this is just her way of making a living."

Others say the move will help examine where America is on the issue of women on television. Jane Pauley, who hosted “Today,” went on to try her own show, “Real Life with Jane Pauley,” which lasted just one season.

“I think that this is the classic double bind and pigeonholing that professional women who choose careers in politics and the media face all of the time,” says Susan Mackey-Kallis, associate professor of film and media studies at Villanova University. “You're damned if you’re too feminine and you’re damned if you're not. It happened to Hillary [Clinton], it happened to [NBC “Today Show’s] Ann Curry, and now it's happened to Katie Couric.”

Part of the challenge will be not only the popular legacy of the Oprah Winfrey Show, but the changing landscape of media as well.

Besides broadcast, there are growing cable and online audiences, all chasing a female demographic in the shrinking 25-54 age range.

According to Nielsen, the percentage of women who are married has fallen from 72 percent in 1960 to 52 percent today, reducing the stay-at-home-mom quotient. Also, most of the new shows are still aimed at Caucasian viewers, despite the fact that Hispanics are the fastest growing segment of the population and African Americans watch more TV than any other demographic.

 Couric, now 55, left “The Today Show” in 2006 as one of its most popular hosts of all time to become the first sole female anchor on the “CBS Evening News.”

The new show will bump up against a crowded field of lucrative shows. The Ellen DeGeneres Show reportedly brings in $100 million for Telepictures and NBC. Dr. Phil, with the end of Oprah Winfrey (which made $300 million a year at its height), brings in $150 million per year.  The syndicated court show, Judge Judy brings in nearly $200 million a year for CBS.

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