Switching channels

Rico says he was just wondering the other night where Katie Couric was going, and Bill Carter has an article in The New York Times on the answer:

On 8 February, executives from NBC, including Steve Burke, the new chief executive, and Steve Capus, the president of news, made their way to the St. Regis Hotel in Manhattan, prepared to make a pitch to bring their one-time news star, Katie Couric, back into the network fold. Ms. Couric, who was seeking a new direction in her career in the form of a syndicated afternoon talk show while also maintaining a continuing role in a network news division, arrived a short time later with her agent, Alan Berger. They had requested a meeting “off the radar,” because they knew how closely Ms. Couric’s future was being tracked. Her contract as anchor of the CBS Evening News had only four months to run.
As they walked in, both Ms. Couric and Mr. Berger were struck by how unsettled the NBC team appeared. They soon learned why. The NBC executives had just bumped into Al Gore, the former vice president, who was there to announce the hiring of Keith Olbermann for his cable channel, Current TV. Mr. Olbermann, the one-time star of MSNBC, had left the network acrimoniously just two weeks earlier, and he and the Current retinue were in the meeting room directly next to the one NBC had rented for the Couric negotiations. “It was awkward,” a senior NBC executive said.
NBC had hoped for better luck with Ms. Couric. But, although the Couric team said it believed the network had made a strong effort to woo her, including use of an elaborate Power Point presentation of the virtues of its syndication proposal and a video urging Ms. Couric to “come home to NBC,” the effort foundered.
Instead, Ms. Couric, in one of television’s worst-kept secrets, is set to announce that she will sign with ABC, which was not even a serious contender the morning she slipped into the St. Regis. The negotiations over Ms. Couric’s future in television unfolded over the last few months and involved three of the four broadcast networks, as well as CNN. They also featured top media executives including Mr. Burke, Robert Iger of Disney, Leslie Moonves of CBS, and Jeff Bewkes of Time Warner. Perhaps unexpectedly, because Ms. Couric had not succeeded in stemming the long ratings descent at The CBS Evening News, she remained something of a hot property.
At a time when Oprah Winfrey, syndicated television’s biggest star, has just left the stage, the courtship of Ms. Couric suggested that the networks, looking to cash in on the enormous revenue potential of syndication, were still willing to make a big bet on stars— even ones like Ms. Couric, who have taken their share of blows in the media.
The details of Ms. Couric’s impending deal with ABC have not been disclosed but, as co-owner of the show Ms. Couric will claim a share of the profits. Syndication has such a great financial upside because successful shows make money from both station fees and advertising revenue, and they are generally inexpensive to produce.
One of the chief negotiators in pursuit of Ms. Couric, speaking anonymously last week because of the confidential nature of the talks, said: “We all know what we’re looking at with a successful syndicated show: $100 million to $300 million a year” in revenue. As host and co-owner, Ms. Couric’s own take each year could be tens of millions of dollars.
For years, Ms. Couric deflected efforts to interest her in a syndicated show. “But looking at the landscape, I thought it would be a good time for a show like this,” she said in an interview by phone. “It just gives me a lot of creative freedom and allows me to be me.”
One reason it made more sense now was because the dominant star of daytime talk, Ms. Winfrey, has left the arena. “I never wanted to compete with her,” Ms. Couric said, “because no one could.”
The Couric group was seeking a situation that would get her back to discussing a range of subjects as she had while on the Today show, where by all accounts she had more fun.
From the start, Ms. Couric made clear that her full partner in the syndicated show, both on the production and business side, would be Jeff Zucker, the former chief executive of NBC, who wanted to make his return to television in a control room as executive producer of the talk show. That was his role on Today, when he and Ms. Couric, along with Matt Lauer, steered the NBC program to ratings dominance that continues unabated.
Mr. Zucker’s presence as the other central player (and profit participant) led to some suspicion that two of his former adversaries, Mr. Burke, who ousted him at NBC, and Mr. Moonves, who always competed ferociously with him at CBS, might have resisted a deal with Ms. Couric because of him.
But both men told Ms. Couric and her team they had no problem with Mr. Zucker’s involvement. In the St. Regis meeting, Mr. Burke told Ms. Couric that he “would be all for that.”
But the NBC opportunity fell apart over what the network believed were excessive demands, including the insistence that NBC guarantee that its stations would free up the 4 p.m. hour for Ms. Couric, and what Ms. Couric’s team viewed as NBC’s inexperience in the syndication business.
CBS made an impressive push, Ms. Couric said, led by Mr. Moonves, who remained a strong supporter of Ms. Couric through her tenure on the evening news. But CBS wanted Ms. Couric to focus on the syndicated show, not a continuing role with its news division. She could have worked for 60 Minutes during the year until the start of the syndicated show in 2012. But under the deal CBS was proposing, that opportunity would have ended with the premiere of the syndicated show.
ABC began to make a serious push in the talks in March. After initially offering Ms. Couric only a network-based show in the early afternoon, ABC and its president, Anne Sweeney, sweetened the offer with a continuing role in the news division.
In April, all the chief members of Ms. Couric’s support group— Mr. Berger; her publicist, Matthew Hiltzik; and her lawyer, Craig Jacobson— met at Mr. Zucker’s apartment in Manhattan to thrash out the options. While Mr. Zucker struggled to figure out how to make coffee for the group, he led the discussion, writing down pros and cons on a large easel. The cases for ABC and CBS were extremely close, and though members of Ms. Couric’s team said ABC had taken a slight edge in everyone’s opinion, they said they believed CBS remained interested right until the end.
That conviction was not reflected in CBS’s moves, however. The network let out word in early May that it had withdrawn its offer, though privately the network also made clear that it was retaining its right to match any deal until the end of Ms. Couric’s contract.
NBC, meanwhile, was taking its own steps to distance itself from any suggestion that it had lost out on Ms. Couric. Its executives underscored that they had never made an offer to Ms. Couric (a point her side acknowledged) and emphasized privately that their internal research showed her to be too unpopular.
Henry Schafer, the executive vice president of Q Scores, which monitors the popularity of personalities, said Ms. Couric’s score had declined since she began on the CBS five years ago, but it remained above the average for television news figures.
Whether that will translate to success in syndication is the big question. Much will depend on which stations agree to buy Ms. Couric’s show and at what hour they choose to run it. Stations have made commitments to other shows in the old Oprah time period.
Ms. Couric’s negotiators did not exact a guarantee that ABC’s stations would carry her show in the 4 p.m. time slot, as they had tried with NBC. The Couric team conducted market research that persuaded them that time periods would open up on enough stations for the syndicated show to gain more than a toe-hold when it made its nationwide debut in the fall of 2012.
Her team settled on a simple formula for success: if the show is good, people will watch it.
Her choice of ABC brings Ms. Couric to her third network address. She said she was happy with how the long negotiating process had worked out. “It is very gratifying that so many people were willing to meet with me and were interested,” she said. “It made me think maybe a show like this could do reasonably well. We’ll see.” Ms. Couric says she wants to build the show around conversations with newsmakers; she mentioned Michelle Obama and Lady Gaga. Ideally, she said, her work for ABC News would include opportunities to conduct interviews on Nightline and perhaps some political reporting. “I just want to be a utility player,” she added.

Rico says what a concept: if the show is good, people will watch it... (And people got paid a lot of money to come up with that.)