Katie Couric

Katie Couric is an American journalist, talk-show host, and author whose three-decade TV-news career — including her 15-year tenure as co-anchor of NBC's Today Show (1991–2006) — has made her one of the most-iconic American TV-news anchors of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. She was born Katherine Anne Couric on January 7, 1957, in Arlington, Virginia. Her father John Martin Couric was a journalist and her mother Elinor Tullie Couric was a homemaker. She graduated from the University of Virginia in 1979 with a Bachelor's degree in American studies.

Her TV-news career began as an assistant at ABC News's Washington bureau and continued through CNN's launch in 1980. She joined NBC News in 1989 as a reporter on the Pentagon beat. Her break came in April 1991 when she replaced Deborah Norville as the Today Show co-anchor opposite Bryant Gumbel — a position she held continuously through May 2006. The Couric era of The Today Show coincided with the program's peak as the most-watched American morning news show.

Her 1990s moment came on March 6, 2000 — when, six months after losing her husband Jay Monahan to colon cancer in January 1998, she underwent a televised colonoscopy live on Today as part of an "Confronting Colon Cancer" awareness campaign. The broadcast — which produced what cancer researchers subsequently called "the Couric Effect" — increased American colorectal-cancer-screening rates by an estimated 20% in the immediate post-broadcast period and is widely cited as one of the most-effective single American public-health-awareness broadcasts in TV history.

She left Today in 2006 to become the CBS Evening News anchor — making her the first solo female anchor of an American evening network newscast. Her five-year CBS tenure (2006–2011) produced the 2008 interview series with Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin that shaped the 2008 American presidential election. After leaving CBS in 2011, she hosted ABC's Katie talk show (2012–2014) and worked as Yahoo's Global News Anchor (2014–2017). She has continued to author bestselling books (the 2021 memoir Going There) and produce her Katie Couric Media digital network.

Her name Katie is the English short form of Katherine (from the Greek Aikaterinē). Katie has been continuously among the most-popular American girls' names for decades.