Stat of the day

From CJR's Michael Massing:

Katie Couric's annual salary is more than the entire annual budgets of NPR's Morning Edition and All Things Considered combined. Couric's salary comes to an estimated $15 million a year; NPR spends $6 million a year on its morning show and $5 million on its afternoon one. NPR has seventeen foreign bureaus (which costs it another $9.4 million a year); CBS has twelve. Few figures, I think, better capture the absurd financial structure of the network news.

Slate's Jack Shafer offered his two cents on Diane Sawyer's new anchor gig at ABC:

My advice to Sawyer is this: If you really want to improve World News, if you really want to make an indelible mark on journalism, turn down the job and persuade ABC News to divert the millions it ordinarily pays its anchor and spend it on 50 or 80 additional reporters to break stories.