Real Katie Couric

Part I "Let Them Know You're Here!" Chapter One The Stuff of Legend Katie Couric was in tears. "I'm going to be fired!" she said. It was Thanksgiving week in 1980, and Katie was in CNN's brand- newWashington bureau on Wisconsin Avenue. She was seated on a big cardboard packing box (most of the office furniture hadn't arrived yet), pouring out her heart to Jean Carper, the network's medical correspondent. "Can you believe it, Jean?" she said. "They're going to fire me!" Katie was a small fireplug of a woman (five-foot-two on a good-posture day), and from her perch on the packing box, her feet barely reached the floor. Thanks to her diminutive size, bubbly personality, and a wide mouth that revealed a set of tiny, childlike teeth, Katie could have been mistaken (and often was) for a high school cheerleader. Nearly six months before-on June 1, 1980-Ted Turner and a handful of veteran journalists had launched the country's first twenty-four-hour-a-day cable news network, and these tough newsmen had trouble taking the girlish Katie seriously. It wasn't that she lacked the smarts or get-up-and-go. On the contrary, Katie was a ball of energy, an entry-level VJ (or video journalist) who was willing to work for $3.35 an hour-25 cents above the federal minimum wage. She came into the CNN Washington bureau on her days off and volunteered to run cameras, write scripts, and produce live stand-ups for correspondents like Jean Carper. Jean had taken a shine to Katie and was distressed to hear that her protegee was going to be fired. The ax couldn't have fallen at aworse time. It was the beginning of the holiday season, and Katie was getting a pink slip instead of the Christmas promotion she had been hoping for. It looked as though Katie was all washed up in the television news business at the tender age of twenty-three. "Jean," Katie pleaded, "what am I going to do?" "Who told you you're getting fired?" Jean asked. "Stuart," said Katie. She was referring to Stuart Loory, the managing editor of CNN's Washington bureau. "Why would Stuart do a thing like that?" Jean asked."I've told him-every time you've gone out to help me produce a segment, you've been a real asset." Katie hadn't confided in Jean Carper that she didn't want to be a producer-someone whose name flashed on the screen for a split second during the credit roll at the end of a show. She had bigger dreams.She dreamed of being a star, and not just a relatively minor star like Jean Carper, but a major star, the biggest kind of star, an anchor at a major network with a show of her own. Katie had been obsessed with this dream since college; in fact, she once told a college boyfriend that her goal was to become the next Barbara Walters, who at the time was co-anchoring ABC's World News Tonight with Harry Reasoner. As soon as Katie received her degree in American studies from the University of Virginia, she talked her way into her first job in TV journalism-as a desk assistant in the Washington bureau of ABC News. "My first day at ABC," she recalled in an interview with Washingtonian magazine, "Sam Donaldson came into the newsroom, jumped on a desk, and started singing 'K-K-K Katy.'" During her brief stint at ABC, Katie was responsible for making coffee, answering phones, and getting ham sandwiches for anchorman Frank Reynolds. "It was the most humiliating job I ever had," Katie said. A few months later, she switched to CNN, because advancement at the fledgling cable network was likely to come a lot quicker than at ABC. Ever since then, she had been pestering CNN's Washington bureau chief, Stuart Loory, to give her a shot on-camera. But Loory, a hard-bitten newsman who had been maKlein, Edward is the author of 'Real Katie Couric ', published 2007 under ISBN 9780307353504 and ISBN 0307353508.