TV personality Katie Couric will indeed by joining Yahoo as first reported by AllThingsD, the company announced via a blog post today. She starts the gig beginning “early 2014,” and will continue her hosting duties on ABC’s Katie concurrently. Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer announced the new hire today via a blog post on Yahoo’s official Tumblr, using a terrible nautical pun.
Couric will officially be in charge of Yahoo’s growing team of news correspondents, which include recent pick up David Pogue, as well as Megan Liberman and Matt Bai. She’ll be taking on a role as the “face of Yahoo News” and will be fronting a lot of original video content shot for the site, according to Mayer. “And this is just the beginning,” Mayer says, and seems so emphatic about it that the paragraph that contains it is actually repeated twice in the original version of the blog post (since corrected).
I already opined at length about Yahoo’s content play and quest for the online video prize, and recent numbers indicate that there will be a feeding frenzy among advertisers to shore up the dwindling TV audiences logging on instead for news and content. Yahoo does seem to have a bit of a split focus, considering how much effort it’s putting into mobile products and services, but video is probably part of the larger picture. Viewers aren’t just turning away from TV and to their computers, after all – they’re increasingly watching on smartphones, too.