Biography:

Thanks to Katie Couric, morning show programs have been elevated to new heights in the field of television journalism. This was the same woman who was told by her former boss at CNN not to appear on air ever, after filling in for a correspondent.

Today had been one of NBC’s lowest-rated programs before Couric anchored it in 1991. Fifteen years since then, Today has been earning the highest ratings among US morning shows. For her outstanding work, NBC has given her a yearly paycheck of $13 million. Due to the show’s success, there has been a palpable paradigm shift in television as of late, with more ads increasingly placed in morning timeslots.

On May 5, 2006, Couric announced her plans to leave Today. On that very same day, CBS, one of the biggest television and radio networks in the US, broadcasted that they will be employing Couric. In September 2006, Katie Couric was officially made its evening newscaster, the first woman in history to be a solo anchor of a network’s weekday evening news program. Aside from CBS Evening News with Katie Couric, she now hosts the network’s evening news specials and works as a correspondent for 60 Minutes.

She is not so much a newcomer to newscasting as an experienced professional. In her days at the NBC news division, working at one point as contributing anchor for Dateline NBC, she had politicians and pop icons for interviewees. She had interviewed every presidential contestant since Bill Clinton, on top of Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush. Hillary Clinton gave her first ever television interview to Couric; John F. Kennedy Jr., his first and last.

Other venerable White House bigwigs interviewed by Couric include Dick Cheney, Madeleine Albright, Colin Powell, and Sandra Day O’Connor. Major world leaders include Tony Blair, Kofi Annan, Ariel Sharon, Prince Abdullah, and Benjamin Netanyahu. Billionaires Bill Gates and J.K. Rowling are other Couric interviewees.

As an NBC news anchor, Couric provided coverage of the destruction of the World Trade Center, the welcoming of the new millennium, the Columbine shootings, and the interment of Princess Diana among other significant events in history.

Katie Couric is a winner of various accolades including multiple Emmy Awards, the Associated Press Award, Society of Professional Journalists’ Sigma Delta Chi Award, Matrix award and the Gracie Allen Awards. She is even a Hollywood star in her own right, appearing in a cameo in Austin Powers in Goldmember and voicing Katie Current in Shark Tale. She was also a guest in the gay-oriented sitcom Will & Grace. In 2001, she was ranked one of the most intriguing personalities by People magazine.

Crusading for her late husband who died in 1998, Katie has been raising awareness of colon cancer. Conducting educational programs and sponsoring relevant scientific studies, she co-founded the National Colorectal Cancer Research Alliance in March 2000. In the same vein, she released the television serial Confronting Colon Cancer, for which she was acclaimed with a George Foster Peabody Award in 2001. Harvard’s School of Public Health honored her with the Julius B. Richmond Award in 2003.

When Katie underwent colonoscopy in 2000 on national TV, the Archives of Internal Medicine reported that the number of people who did the same increased by 20%. Scientists at the University of Michigan attributed it to the “Katie Couric Effect,” a final proof of the journalist’s influence.