COURIC: BAD TIMING COULD KILL HER TALK SHOW

Katie Couric could not have picked a more difficult time to launch a new daytime talk show. That appears to be the consensus of television executives interviewed by former Broadcasting & Cable executive editor P.J. Bednarski for the website TVNewsCheck.com. Bill Carroll, VP of programming for Katz Television Group, the media buying and consulting company, noted that Couric’s debut is “coming a full year after Oprah so new viewing habits will have been set. It’s coming at the beginning of the second year of most three-year contracts for other talk shows so there aren’t many good spots on the schedule to put her.” As Bednarski observed, other syndicators have already grabbed the 4:00 p.m. slot that Oprah once occupied and even with that time period — the most ideal for a daytime talk show — Oprah’s audience had diminished to less than half what it was in the early ’90s. Says Bednarski: “Couric’s real timing problem is that broadcasting isn’t what it used to be, even a few years ago. The size of the broadcast daytime audience is smaller than in Winfrey’s prime, whittled away by scores of cable channels.”