Katie Couric recalls being one of several media celebrities hired to bring a resurgence to Yahoo in 2014, but she said it wasn’t enough to revive the slipping tech giant.
The Today and CBS Evening News veteran was brought on to bring new attention to the company, as were political columnist Matt Bai and tech reviewer David Pogue. But Couric left Yahoo in July, and has since revealed her time spent as a global news anchor as “unfulfilling.”
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“I would say to the Yahoo folks, ‘Could we please do a newsletter? I’ll push out everyone’s content,’” Couric recalled on an a special crossover episode of Recode Decode, hosted by Kara Swisher, and Couric’s own podcast. “They hired some big names, and yet they were in the witness protection program.”
Couric said she attempted to carry on her legacy of high-quality journalism at Yahoo while the company was busy running stories like “the boy who lived on ramen noodles for 13 years.”
The broadcast veteran said that while then-CEO Marissa Mayer was open to Couric’s plans for the site’s improvement, her aspirations were never put into action.
“I don’t think she ever understood the commitment that would take,” she said. “And I think she had a lot of other things on her plate, in fairness. I wouldn’t say it was an unhappy marriage, but it certainly was not fulfilling for me. I had all this great content, I was getting big interviews, and it was sort of like a tree falling in the forest.”
She said her hard-hitting features never appeared on the site’s front page, adding, “They didn’t know how to — even now, they don’t have very good distribution.”
“They didn’t really know how to market things properly. They didn’t know how to take quality and make it scalable,” Couric continued.
Couric exited the company when it was merged into Verizon’s AOL to form Oath. She said that before she left, she told Oath CEO Tim Armstrong that the company should be named “Rize,” reflecting both the play on Verizon and the word’s optimistic nature.
She said her clever idea was not met with enthusiasm, adding, “I think they paid a lot of money to come up with Oath. Whatever.”
Since her split from Yahoo, Couric has focused on her podcast and her production company, Katie Couric Media. Following her two-hour special titled Gender Revolution: A Journey With Katie Couric, the journalist landed a series on National Geographic called America Inside Out, which will premiere in April.
Also in the works is Unbelievable, a scripted series in development for Netflix, based on “An Unbelievable Story of Rape,” a Pulitzer Prize-winning article from ProPublica.
Couric also reprised her role as host of the Winter Olympics opening ceremony on NBC in February, her first appearance on the program since 2004.
