Katie Couric: “I hope to see you tomorrow night.�

Further thoughts on my professionally issued thoughts on Katie Couric’s debut in the anchor’s chair of “The CBS Evening News� (which concluded with the quote cited above):

A number of outlets I’ve perused have, in their initial takes on her initial performance, highlighted Couric’s ostensible “scoop� of the evening, offering the first glimpse of uber-infant Suri Cruise from the issue of Vanity Fair that hits the stands Tuesday. That’s hardly Couric’s fault and, in fact, disrespects the good job she did overall in the anchor’s chair. But then, she may have invited it just a smidgen with her tease of it at the beginning of the newscast, showing the cover with the miracle baby’s face blurred, in effect forcing viewers to stick around - just to witness the visage of the result of a celebrity coupling.

Couric will, in fact, probably do quite serviceable work as a news anchor. CBS CEO Les Moonves, who famously decried the “Voice-of-God� anchorman nearly two years ago, told me in July of hiring Couric, “This is not the voice-of-God theory. Katie is not that. The Voice-of-God was the imperial voice of God skewing us through the news. I think Katie is anti-voice-of-God. I don’t think that’s counter-intuitive to what I said at all.�

And he’s right: Couric opened her broadcast with a folksy, “Hi, everyone,� which is in keeping with what fans like about her and eschews the sort of TV-news-man earnestness that most people understand is as much a performance as Couric’s gal-next-door persona.

Couric opened with a terrific report from CBS correspondent Lara Logan, who has been doing excellent work from the Middle East for quite some time, on the Taliban’s troubling resurrection in Afghanistan. The story was given enough time to allow Logan to include telling details of her handling by the Taliban and the dangers the region still faces, even the fact that the extremists defiantly pray in the open a mere 10 miles from a U.S. base – their weapons at the ready.

Though the Suri Cruise thing wasn’t the only pop-culture take in Tuesday’s newscast – she introduced a brief musical snippet from Peter Gabriel, as well as images of the late “Croc Hunter,� Ted Baxter, Ron Burgundy and even TV wrestling, along with a commentary by cheeky documentarian Morgan Spurlock - Couric more or less covered the day's significant events, which, on this day, weren't all that significant. With copious pop-culture references, non-news features and a smattering of commentary, Couric and CBS have striven to create a kinder, gentler, slightly more humanized telecast that can easily be digested by a wide array of viewers – not unlike a distilled version of your daily newspaper.

In fact, the newscast Couric Version 1.0 most reminded me of was MSNBC’s “Countdown with Keith Olbermann,� which also combines pop culture with trenchant commentary, but filtered through its anchor’s snarky wit.

I spoke to Olbermann in July, as well – though far removed from Moonves – and, though he’s taken numerous potshots at Couric on his newscast, he advocated exploiting personality in the evening news (he included NBC’s own Brian Williams, who has a very dry and playful sense of humor when not delivering the news).

“If … CBS has made this huge investment in a personality, why wouldn’t you?� he said. “I’m not telling (anyone) how to do (his or her) business, but why not do a tweak that might hurt you short term but might produce long-term results that might be prohibitive in terms of a race between two other operations. … You’re going to have to realize that these are television broadcasts. It’d be lovely if it were, ‘OK, sit down and shut up,’ but we’re competing against everything else in the world. You’ve got to try to make something else out of it – just try. Don’t even announce it, just do it, and people might like it, they might not, and you stop doing it and go back to the old format.�

CBS’s new, subtly different approach won’t likely resurrect the network evening newscast or result in significant long-term ratings growth, but it certainly won’t kill it off, either, though hardcore news junkies will likely look elsewhere.

The true test of Couric’s mettle, however, will come when a big, breaking news story erupts close to airtime and she and her producers won’t have time to edit together neatly scripted packages and can’t rely on NewsLite features. With the mid-term elections approaching and the war in Iraq remaining unpredictable, that day may be soon in coming.