What will Couric bring to CBS news?

No one who keeps tabs on the ever-shifting landscape of network news these days was the least bit surprised when the CBS brass recently tapped Katie Couric to anchor the evening news.

The move, which would make the bubbly “Today” show star the first woman to anchor a network news broadcast without a male at her side, was, after all, just about the worst-kept secret in the business.

Mark Kelley, an assistant professor of communications and journalism at the University of Maine, was more intrigued with the possible format changes being considered by CBS to restore the evening news to something approaching its former status in living rooms across the country.

Hearing CBS boss Les Moonves’ programming speculations a year ago reminded Kelley of the 1976 movie “Network,” which portrayed the absurd lengths – on-air soothsayers and urban terrorists included – that one fictional TV station would go to in order to lift its sagging news ratings.

“It really made me wonder what wild and crazy things they had planned for the evening news,” said Kelley, who spent more than 20 years in the TV news business, first in Syracuse, N.Y., and later as the anchor for the NBC affiliate in South Bend, Ind.

But while Couric has her many media detractors, who view the twinkly-eyed morning host as perhaps too much of a fluffball to bear up under the weighty anchor mantle, Kelley said she may very well prove her critics wrong when she assumes Dan Rather’s old throne in September.

“In an era of celebrity newscasters,” he said, “Couric is the biggest gorilla on the block right now, way out in front of people like Brian Williams, Elizabeth Vargas or Judy Woodruff. She is it. And she certainly has had the opportunity to do some serious work on the morning show, facing off with major world leaders and reporting on major world events. It’s not been all Halloween costumes and baking cakes.”

Couric’s famous perkiness and affability, he suggested, may actually work in her favor by bringing to CBS news for the first time a whole new audience of younger viewers who have been waking up to her for years now.

“Americans have definitely acquired the morning TV news habit,” he said, “and there’s a very good chance that they’ll follow Couric from the morning show to the evening news.”

Kelley’s hopeful assessment echoes that of Steve Capus, the president of NBC News, who told The New York Times this week, “I think with Katie going to CBS, people are going to be talking about the evening news again.”

And even a little buzz, after all, would no doubt be welcomed in the world of network news, which in the past decade or so has been widely regarded as passe, if not a dinosaur doomed to extinction, with the profusion of 24-hour cable news outlets and Internet-based sources of information.

“Like it or not,” Kelley said, “we really are past the era of the sober, monolithic rock-solid anchors who earned their stripes in the trenches during a war – World War II, Korea, Vietnam. The guys with the old-world credentials – being a network’s chief White House correspondent, for instance – they’re gone, all of them. It’s a different world now, and the cable channels have helped to establish women as principal anchors of their news shows. So maybe with Couric, we’re seeing something brand new, something that’s never happened before.”

Whether Couric really is ready for prime time is anyone’s guess, of course. But Kelley is rooting for her to succeed in breathing new life into the declining evening news format.

As an old-school TV veteran, he doesn’t believe the public is necessarily well-served by news on demand, where people seek out only the information that interests them or that fits their personal agendas.

“It distresses me,” he said, “that everyone is losing the habit of coming together for a half hour each night with a solid, professional journalist, someone who can help them make some sense of the news of the day and give them the information they need to make good decisions and to contribute to society.”