Katie Couric: yesterday’s news

Katie Couric's was the face that America loved to wake up to. For more than 15 years she starred on the morning TV show Today with ratings that left her broadcast rivals green. She had blonde hair in a good-girl bob, wide eyes, a pert gummy smile and, for a bonus, great legs. She had a nice, chatty way of delivering news and morning drivel.

But now Couric is making headlines as the Last Face of Broadcast News. Once she was credited with one of the major breakthroughs of modern journalism: when technicians cut away the front of her desk to display those legs, and audience ratings shot up. But the pert smile is fading. Couric, 51, is about to be fired.

It is not all her fault. No less a figure than Don Hewitt, the