Beyond her at-large responsibilities for the network, Ms. Couric is to begin work on a syndicated talk show with her onetime Today producer, Jeff Zucker, to premiere in fall 2012. Let the post-Oprah daytime landscape shift--and unsubstantiated rumors of trilateral Walters-Sawyer-Couric enmity--begin now!

ddaddario@observer.com :: @DPD_

ddaddario@observer.com :: @DPD_

Mr. Kurtz asked his panelists if they thought Mr. Westin was pushed or nudged out of his job by Walt Disney president Bob Iger. Did they have a falling out over Christiane Amanpour? Maybe, but in any case, the future of news has a lot of Skype interviews and that's not really Mr. Westin's style.

Mr. Westin wrote that he was leaving to pursue other professional opportunities. "I've always admired those few who know when it's time to move on. This is the right time for me," he wrote.

The New York Times' Bill Carter reported Monday that there were also financial pressures behind the move. In February ABC News shed nearly 400 jobs and, according to Mr. Carter, there is still pressure on Mr. Westin to increase the division's profit margins.

"I won't pretend that all of this will be easy," Mr. Westin wrote to his staff when announcing changes to the division, including buyouts, in the spring. "But I do truly believe that it will be good for ABC News. I believe in this institution. I believe in its mission and in its future."

Following the announcement, Mr. Westin told The Observer that the cuts were affecting every level of the company.

"I'm never going to talk about any individuals' salaries, because it wouldn't be fair," Mr. Westin said. "But I can tell you without reservation, we've been addressing that for a few years now, quietly behind the scenes. The economic reality has effected everyone's compensation."

In the last year Mr. Westin oversaw the transition of George Stephanopoulos to Good Morning America, Christiane Amanpour to This Week and Diane Sawyer to World News Tonight.

Mr. Westin told The Observer that he had full confidence in Mr. Stephanopoulos and his GMA team going into the spring.

“I’m hopeful that if you talk to me in six months or a year that the audience will have responded,” said Mr. Westin. “This is way early going. But the way I look at it, we are in better shape than I would have predicted at this point.”

Network president Anne Sweeney has arranged for Mr. Westin to stay on through the end of the year to ensure a smooth transition. Mr. Westin is expected to address the staff today.

A spokesman for ABC told Mr. Elliott that the network never retracted the story and that Mr. Ross' reporting was simply folded into a larger, more newsworthy story about the arrest of Yemeni hijackers.

"We fully stand by the reporting on the story. The story was overwritten and overtaken by the changing the story about the Yemeni men in custody. You should not read into that that we backed away," said the spokesman.

Mr. Ross's original story was sourced to "one senior U.S. official" — not the sort of thing that goes away. And it's hard to see where Mr. Ross' original item was folded into the new story.

Longtime CBS News Washington-based corrpesondent Jim Stewart spoke with The Observer in 2007 about Mr. Ross' reporting for the web.

Jim Stewart, who recently retired as CBS News’ longtime Washington-based correspondent, expressed reservations about some of Mr. Ross’ work, in particular questioning the accuracy of some of Mr. Ross’ stories on the ABC investigative team’s Web site, The Blotter.

“Were they wrong some of the time? Yes,” said Mr. Stewart “I’d rather be right than be first.

Read: Hold the Champagne — Are Brian Ross' ABC Scoops All They're Cracked Up to Be?

To start the day, Ms. Sawyer looks like a "64-year-old housewife in need of a cup of coffee," wrote Mr. Kurtz.

Later Mr. Kurtz showed Ms. Sawyer ducking in here, tweaking a story there, running up those stairs, lifting that piano. "Nearly everyone has a story about her stamina," he wrote.  That is, Everyone knows she's a workhorse after 11 years on the early shift at Good Morning America.

There is one interesting, and timely, moment in the Mr. Kurtz's story. Ms. Sawyer interviews Michael Hastings about his Rolling Stone article and she mentions the fact that she used to date Richard Holbrooke, special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan. In Mr. Hastings' piece, General McChrystal complains about emails from Mr. Holbrooke. 

Ms. Sawyer called Mr. Holbrooke "brave" and "inexhaustible." "I don't know how to explain to people how we can have a personal connection to someone and still be a reporter. They either think we're lying or we're automatons," she said.

It's an interesting quotation, considering that today Mr. Kurtz also wrote about the end of Dave Weigel's career at The Washington Post. The lesson there: Being a real person gets in the way of being a journalist, or at least keeping a job in journalism.

I am writing in defense of Mimi Gurbst because I can no longer countenance the abuse of anonymity that has allowed others to cowardly malign her in perpetuity on the Internet. Like Mimi Gurbst, I worked at ABC for nearly thirty years. I no longer work there and, like Mimi Gurbst, I chose to leave of my own accord. When I arrived at ABC in 1982 I was a lowly freelance researcher at a fledgling news show called Nightline. Mimi and I were not close then but she was a well respected assignment editor on the ABC News assignment desk. Over the years our paths would occasionally cross but we were not close friends and I watched her garner professional accomplishments and raise a family from afar. Her ability to juggle both impressed me and inspired me to attempt to do the same. Unlike Mimi and, I can only assume, many of her anonymous detractors, I have worked at places other then ABC News – specifically ABC’s Daytime division and a magazine and book publisher not affiliated with ABC or it’s parent company, Disney. These experiences have given me a perspective that many of her critics seem to lack: all companies and the divisions within them are plagued by politics, people who feel they’ve been passed over, and the intricacies of human nature that some choose to interpret as dysfunction, favoritism, and discord. Let me say this: ABC News is not unique, in fact, it was a better place to work then many others. Mimi Gurbst navigated the shark infested waters there better then most – clearly she did her job well since ABC was either number one or a strong number two in the network news race during her tenure there. Since the attacks on her have been so pointedly personal let me also say that she is a beloved wife and mother to two kind and successful children and it is with her family in mind that I tell you she was a role model to many working women seeking to raise families while pursuing a highly competitive career they loved, a career that demands long hours, travel, and sacrifice. Mimi possesses an excellent editorial sense and was often representative of the core group of television viewers – women 25 to 54 – that make up the lion’s share of the audience of most shows on network television, a group that is still woefully underrepresented in the upper echelons of management. It is difficult to be a woman in corporate America. The deck was stacked against Mimi and her like from the beginning. She has chosen to leave at a time of life when many women are forced from their jobs – she was not. Once again, Mimi is a role model and inspiration in choosing to reinvent herself by returning to school, forging a new career, and doing something positive. Let’s applaud her decision and hope that others are able to embrace change as positively instead of venting their frustrations at the demise of our industry by attacking others.

Jessica Stedman Guff

Former Executive Producer, ABC News

Somewhere along the say, sources tell The Observer,  Ms. Gurbst became a kind of cherished, if unofficial, career counselor at ABC News, helping countless young producers and correspondents find their way at a particularly tumultuous time in an already confusing business.

Soon Ms. Gurbst will be counseling uncertain youngsters, full-time.

To wit: Later this year, Ms. Gurbst will step down from ABC News, where she has worked for the past 30 years, in order to pursue a new career as a high-school guidance counselor.

Sources tell The Observer that in August, Ms. Gurbst, who is 57 years old, will begin a master's degree program in "Risk and Prevention," at Harvard University's Graduate School of Education, with the aim of becoming a high-school guidance counselor and perhaps someday running her own school.

It's a rocky time in broadcast news. Recently, ABC News cut a hefty amount of its staff in a painful round of buyouts and layoffs. But the timing of Ms. Gurbst's departure from the network, according to an ABC News spokesperson, is not a result of the layoffs. Ms. Gurbst has long been planning a move into educational counseling. In recent years, she has volunteered extensively at P.S. 69 in the Bronx.

"This is a bittersweet time for us with Mimi leaving," Jon Banner the executive producer of World News told us on Tuesday afternoon. "But we’re so excited for her. It’s incredibly fitting that what she’s going to do—and what she finds so much joy in—is something she’s been doing for so many years right here at ABC."

"She has spent immense amounts of time and patience counseling all of us, helping us through lots of difficult times, and giving us advice on what to do," he added. "I can only imagine how lucky every child will be who someday walks into her office for advice."

What's the most memorable guidance Mr. Banner ever received from Ms. Gurbst?

"She made sure that I met and married my wife," said Mr. Banner.

Through a spokesperson, Ms. Gurbst declined an interview request.

No word yet on whether Ms. Gurbst will advise her future high-school students to pursue careers in the broadcast news business—or to avoid the journalism racket altogether.

"Topics include everything from Tiger Woods, to Apple’s iPad," an ABC News blog announced today. "Each topics page showcases ABCNews.com reporting at the top and partner content just below with an emphasis on related topics and photos."

According to a blog post from Daylife, ABC News will now be pulling in material from "over 8,000 of the web’s best mainstream and blog sources."

The news of the aggregation agreement comes at a time when ABC News is shedding a hefty portion of its editorial staff in an ongoing round of severe cutbacks.

This Sunday, Bill Adair, Washington bureau chief of the St. Petersburg Times and editor of PolitiFact, will join ABC News to fact check the newsmakers (Hillary Clinton! Robert Gates! Rudy Giuliani!) appearing on ABC's This Week.

Fact!

Jake Tapper will be hosting.

Fact!

Mr. Tapper and Mr. Adair know each other from "fact-checking forums."

Fact!

Jay Rosen originally suggested the idea.

Fact!

Jay Rosen has lots of suggestions.

Fact!

Two weeks ago, ABC News began live-tweeting This Week.

Fact!

NBC's Meet the Press is still the dominant Sunday morning news show.