The Evening News Report: The News At Six (Months)

Yesterday, The "CBS Evening News With Katie Couric" turned six. Six months, that is. The show, which is in third place in the ratings behind the nightly newscasts on ABC and NBC, has been something of an experiment since Couric came on board. The "FreeSpeech" segment, which was fairly radical by nightly news standards, has apparently disappeared; correspondents have come and gone; and Couric has tried to inject more personality into the show, something that has proven difficult within the confines of a 22-minute broadcast.

"I think in some ways we owed it to the industry to try new things," CBS News President Sean McManus told Eric Deggans. "But we found at 6:30 with only 22 minutes of programming time, people basically want you to tell them what happened in the world that day . . . That's probably the biggest lesson we learned."

The broadcast, as Deggans points out, today "looks a lot more like [Couric's] competitors' broadcasts - though with more feature stories, more health stories and more stories with the lead anchor as reporter, according to data on analyst Andrew Tyndall's Web site."

CBS brass have maintained from the beginning that they did not expect the show to jump to #1 immediately, and they continue to say that they are giving it time to develop. "We don't like being No. 3 at all, but I still firmly believe if we keep putting on a better and better show, we're going to see some growth in the ratings," McManus told the Los Angeles Times. "I'm very patient, Katie's patient, my boss is patient."

But no one is patient forever, and there is clearly pressure on all involved to increase ratings.

I talked last week about how the show faces something of an identity crisis: Should it try to reach out to new, relatively young viewers, the 25-54 year olds who bring in higher ad revenue? Or should it pursue the older viewers who now make up a large chunk of the audience? Lately, the "Evening News" has shown signs that the primary focus is now the latter.

The presence of feel-good features like The American Spirit and Assignment America, along with the preponderance of health stories on the broadcast, seems to signal a movement away from experimentation and towards the kind of broadcast likely to appeal to the existing audience. For the past few weeks, the "Evening News" has seemed to be trying to build the audience it has, even if it means giving up, to some degree, on the one it wants.