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_

The most recent cuts in London follow broader tightening over the last two years at CBS News stateside and abroad. At the beginning of the year, CBS issued cuts to dozens of staff, including some veteran producers.

Mr. Friedman spoke with The Observer in January of 2009 as CBS was using reporters out of its London Bureau to cover stories as far away as the Middle East. "The old model no longer applies,”  Mr. Friedman said. “You do not need a massive infrastructure, as long as you can mobilize people quickly when the story develops." One week earlier, following cuts to CBS Tel Aviv bureau, London-based correspondent Mark Phillips flew to the Gaza Strip to cover a story.

Page Six also reported yesterday that CBS Evening News anchor Katie Couric may return to The Today Show when her contract expires in May. Insiders called the speculation "ridiculous."

Earlier: D-Day at CBS News  / Do You Know the Way to Tel Aviv? For CBS, via London

The network is already in tough shape after cutting 100 jobs in February. This summer Katie Couric's CBS Evening News saw its worst ratings in 20 years. Nobody at the news network has been able to get new business cards since then because the person who handled the orders was cut. Cell phone service has been limited on many producers' BlackBerries to save extra money (they've been told to use text messages instead). Nobody in the office ever hears from CBS news division president Sean McManus anymore. But at least speculation about Ms. Couric's future at the network is alive and well.

CBS News is defintely not alone. Elsewhere in the media business, USA Today will also be making somewhere around 130 cuts this fall.

Update: Steve Krakauer heard from a CBS spokesperson, who said that Ms. Dana's speculation is "ridiculous."

Many of Ms. Couric’s viewers would return the following night. Much of Ms. Couric’s staff would not.

It had been a rough day at CBS News. Four and a half years earlier, CBS chief Les Moonves had joked in The New York Times Magazine about bombing the news division. And now, among the seasoned veterans of the newsroom, there was a sense that the detonation had finally gone off. Earlier that morning, CBS News executives and bureau chiefs, led by senior vice president Linda Mason, told their employees that 2009 had been a disastrous year in the ad market. They had no cable operation to buoy the sinking revenues. It’s not you, was the message, it’s us. Dozens of employees—including staff members in D.C., San Francisco, Miami, London, Los Angeles and Moscow—were being let go. The changes were effective immediately. There would be no buyouts. According to one longtime staff member, the network had long ago negotiated away most of the severance clauses in staff members’ contracts.

>>READ FELIX GILLETTE'S STORY ON BAD RATINGS AT CBS EVENING NEWS

Word of the layoffs had first surfaced the previous Friday afternoon in the L.A. Times. Over the weekend, CBS staffers vacillated between acceptance of the situation and cautious optimism. Maybe it wouldn’t be as bad as reported? After all, the company was already lean. Where would top brass find 100 or so people to let go? Perhaps there was some stash of employees hidden on the digital side, some long-forgotten deal between, say, 60 Minutes and Yahoo, that would provide some bodies to lessen the blow?

But in the end, the cuts were surprisingly deep. By Monday afternoon, staffers from Washington to L.A. were sputtering in disbelief as they heard of top producers on the chopping block—particularly Mark Katkov and Jill Rosenbaum in D.C. and Roberta Hollander and Barbara Pierce in L.A. These were seasoned veterans, part of the old school known back in the Dan Rather days as “the Hard Corps.” Over the years, they had somehow managed to outlive every big buzz saw to cut through the newsroom. They knew how to get more from less. Each thought of himself as worth five producers at ABC News. Their theme song was Merle Haggard’s “Holding Things Together.” It was hard to imagine what the already third-place morning and evening news operations would look like without them.

The most disturbing news of the day for many observers was that Larry Doyle would no longer be working for CBS News.

Mr. Doyle, according to CBS News legend, joined the organization some 40 years ago, when then D.C. bureau chief Bill Small found him working as a porter at a Washington hotel. Mr. Small promptly made Mr. Doyle the bureau’s go-to “dogrobber”—the guy you sent into nasty situations to stare down snarling subjects and get the job done. From there, Mr. Doyle gradually worked his way up the news ladder, eventually becoming the network’s top war producer, churning out great television from every hellhole on the planet—including Baghdad, where he served as the network’s bureau chief during the early years of the ongoing war.

Reached the afternoon of Tuesday, Feb. 2, Dan Rather recounted various stories of Mr. Doyle’s heroism in the field, including his impressive management of gun-toting teenagers in Somalia. “He’s one of the all-time greats,” said Mr. Rather. “He’s the soul of the place.”

“This is a guy,” he added, “whom Ed Murrow would have been glad to have as his producer.”

For the time being, no on-air reporters or anchors have been asked to leave. But according to multiple sources, the network did inform a handful of veteran correspondents, including Randall Pinkston in New York, Sandra Hughes in L.A. and Sheila MacVicar in London, that they were being reassigned from prominent network jobs to reporting for CBS Newspath.

Historically, the Newspath—a news-gathering service that provides coverage for local CBS stations—was a stepping stone for young correspondents on their way from regional station jobs to the big time at the network. Going from network to Newspath is generally seen as a major demotion. Some sources speculated that the move was made as a passive-aggressive attempt to chase off salary-heavy talent. It had the appearance, as one source put it, of “a slower form of death.”

On Tuesday, CBS staffers were still on guard. Word had it that executives from the news division were still on the move, meeting with staffers at bureaus around the country, bringing more bad tidings.

Reporting on the death of CBS News is an age-old discipline among TV writers. Books have been written on the subject. (See, Boyer, Peter; 1988; Who Killed CBS?) But as the names of the laid-off began to circulate, it looked less like the end of days and more like the end of an era. The final vestiges of the pre–Katie Couric regime were finally leaving the network. “It’s like we’re Lehman Brothers,” said one longtime staff member, “and the JPMorgan guys are finishing moving in.”

fgillette@observer.com

More from Felix Gillette:

What Is Going on With the Ratings at CBS Evening News?

ABC's Broadcast Operations and Engineering Division Makes Significant Cuts in New York

Appeals Court Rules in Favor of CBS--Tosses Out Dan Rather's $70 Million Suit in Its Entirety

But last week, that's exactly where CBS found themselves.  To wit: On Tuesday, June 9, Mr. Drudge posted a photo of Katie Couric at the top of the Drudge Report along with a link to a TV Newser story about the evening news ratings for the week of June 1.

"[W]ith an average of 5.18M Total Viewers, the CBS Evening News with Katie Couric had its lowest viewership yet," wrote TV Newser's Chris Ariens. "In fact, it's the lowest viewership since at least the 1991/92 season, as far back as Nielsen records track."

But wait—wasn't the CBS Evening News enjoying a nice little upswing? That was the impression given just one week earlier when on Tuesday, June 2, CBS News sent out a press release touting itself as the "ONLY NETWORK NEWS DIVISION TO GROW AUDIENCES FOR EVERY PROGRAM."

At the top of the press release, CBS gave a nod to Ms. Couric's game-changing interview with Sarah Palin; touted a slight gain on ABC's World News Tonight with Charles Gibson; and stated that The CBS Evening News with Katie Couric was the "only network news program to gain total viewers" during the previous season. 

So what happened to the supposed momentum?

Over the weekend, The Observer went back and took another look at the ratings data from the previous prime-time season. Sure enough, as stated in the press release, The CBS Evening News did increase viewers. But the gain was Lilliputian. Between Sept. 22, 2008, and May, 20 2009, The CBS Evening News went from 6.43 million viewers to 6.44 millions viewers. Overall viewership was essentially flat. And at the same time, in the key 25-54 demographic, The CBS Evening News actually lost viewers compared to the previous season, dropping from 2.02 million to 1.97 million.

In other words, the momentum in the ratings wasn't really lost. It didn't so much exist in the first place. Luckily,  Ms. Couric has subsequently received some serious advice on how she might turn around the numbers.

Their responses:

At one point during the interview, Ms. Couric asked about an apparent difference in positions between the two politicians on the same ticket.

"Over the weekend, Gov. Palin, you said the U.S. should absolutely launch cross-border attacks from Afghanistan into Pakistan to, quote, 'stop the terrorists from coming any further in," said Ms. Couric. "Now, that's almost the exact position that Barack Obama has taken and that you, Sen. McCain, have criticized as something you do not say out loud. So, Gov. Palin, are you two on the same page on this?"

The candidates' answers eventually devolved into a discourse on "gotcha journalism."

Here's the relevant part of the transcript:

Now, Steve Krakauer at TV Newser is reporting that CBS Evening News with Katie Couric hit a new low last week.

"The broadcast averaged 5.33 million Total Viewers and 1.54M in A25-54." reports Mr. Krakauer. "The week of April 21, the previous low, the broadcast drew 5.34M Total Viewers and 1.58M in the demo."

Her verdict?

Not super!

"Couric's interpretation of the role of anchor led her to repress the qualities that drew people to her in the first place, and she often comes across as hollow and robotic," writes Ms. Franklin. "I'm never as aware that anybody is reading from a teleprompter as I am when I'm watching Couric."

More from the review:

With all her years of experience in front of the camera, one would think Katie Couric might stash the snark when preparing to go live. Not so.

In this clip, after complaining about her crappy microphone, Ms. Couric, 51, goes on to joke that “Giuliani’s dead,” pretending to decapitate herself. After a few more moments of idle chitchat, the CBS Evening News anchor compares John McCain’s wife, Cindy, to a Husky (as in the breed of dog). “Look at those eyes, she’s freakin’ me out a little,” she wisecracks of the politico’s spouse.

Jibes aside, Ms. Couric comes off as kind of hysterical—the life of the party, in fact. Even still, after she jokes about suffering a heart attack, the set crew cheers excitedly off-camera.