• by Steve Smith , Staff Writer @popeyesm, June 10, 2010

There is a deft little bit of online programming premiering over at CBSNews.com and on-air this week. Katie gets Twitter-fied. Anchor of the Evening News Katie Couric is soliciting news-oriented questions from her audience on her Twitter feed and Facebook account that she answers on-air. In a four minute segment, the questions usually follow a specific theme, like the oil disaster in the gulf. The idea is to bring audience voices and interactivity into a format that has been the very model of top-down, authoritative news media for five decades now. Nothing speaks to old media power and elitism than the half-hour network news. Long piloted by graying white men, even the gender barrier only broke down in recent years. The nightly news is an emblem of mass media. Three of us talk, the millions of you listen.

And so letting in the Internet, let alone the trendy channels of Twitter and Facebook, will always seem uncomfortable at first. Like the rest of the anchors, Katie's stern voice is supposed to carry the weight of an enormous news department. When that voice has to name the Twitter participant "Thumper 46" or "DJ Raven" it comes off a bit like, well me trying to break dance.

Their heart is in the right place, however. Involving the audience is a natural response to the interactive revolution digital media provoked. But I am not sure that TV's embrace of Internet culture is very smooth yet. Even the MTV Music Awards tried to get down with Twitter by highlighting posts during the pre-show. Somehow it always feels tertiary and and out of place. We are still waiting for content convergence of a higher order.

But there is something even a bit clever about the anchor Twitter Q&A. It gives CBS News the opportunity to highlight the depth of its talent. Katie herself is not pretending to answer the questions. She farms them out to the "Chief Whatever Correspondent" who could be anywhere around the world. CBS is underscoring the value of a traditional, well-funded, team of beat reporters even as it is leveraging (or scraping) the interactive gestalt of the very medium that is threatening those old media models. There is a sly sub-text to the Q&A with Katie. It seems to remind us there is value to network news even as Google, blogs and the free internet challenge its existence.

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