CBS Evening News Anchor Katie Couric has missed out on the chance to take over for CNN’s Larry King leaving her with future options should the network not renew her contract next year.

From the New York Times

For years, whenever television fortune-tellers forecast Larry King’s eventual replacement, Katie Couric’s name was the first to be mentioned: one of the best interviewing jobs on television, and one of the best-known interviewers on television. It seemed a perfect match.

Now, Piers Morgan, a judge on “America’s Got Talent,” is on the verge of obtaining the job, which comes with a mandate to revive CNN’s fortunes in prime time.

So what happened? For Ms. Couric, the timing wasn’t right. For Mr. Morgan, the timing was made right.

Earlier this year, through a quiet but persistent campaign, Mr. Morgan made himself a viable candidate. His job application was his British interview show, “Life Stories.” He presented himself as a solution to a problem — the problem being CNN’s dreadful 9 p.m. ratings, which counted 674,000 viewers in the spring versus 995,000 for MSNBC and 2.63 million for Fox News.

Separately, last spring, executives at CNN, a unit of Time Warner, were gradually coming to the conclusion that they could not maintain the status quo at 9 p.m. At the end of June, Mr. King announced that he had decided on his own to end “Larry King Live” this fall.

Ms. Couric and Mr. Morgan were the two people considered for the coveted slot. Succeeding Mr. King once looked like a perfect exit strategy for Ms. Couric, as their contracts were due to expire a month apart, in May 2011 for Mr. King and in June 2011 for Ms. Couric.

But when the timetable for a change was suddenly compressed, it was apparent that unwinding Ms. Couric from her CBS deal this year would be severely complicated. In June a person close to Ms. Couric said there was “virtually no scenario” that could place her on CNN — or anywhere else — before 2011.

Once Mr. King’s seat is filled, the fortune-telling about Ms. Couric’s future will resume in full. When her contract is up next spring, she could remain as the anchor of the “CBS Evening News,” which is the third-place news show, though not at her current salary of $15 million a year; most likely she will have to package several jobs together to come close to matching it. She is said to have discussed a number of ideas, including a production company affiliated with CBS and a daytime talk show on CBS stations, with the chief executive of CBS, Leslie Moonves.

But a decision to stay at CBS might be hard to believe for anyone who has heard Ms. Couric’s list of grievances against the network. After she arrived in 2006 from NBC, she was frustrated by what she perceived to be a barebones staff and a lack of marketing and public relations support.

CNN executives want it known that they still see room for her at the cable news network. Last Tuesday she was seen at the Central Park South restaurant Marea having lunch with Jeffrey L. Bewkes, the chief executive of Time Warner.

It is possible that CNN and CBS — always rumored to be weighing a news-sharing pact — could share Ms. Couric; already the CNN stars Anderson Cooper and Dr. Sanjay Gupta contribute to the CBS program “60 Minutes.” The two companies continue to talk about a broader merger or content-sharing arrangement.

Her hiring would reinforce CNN’s hard news brand. Some people at CNN think Ms. Couric would work well at 7 p.m., a spot now taken up by “John King, USA,” an underperforming show that is starting to come under scrutiny.

And then there’s NBC, the network Ms. Couric left four years ago. Jeffrey Zucker, the chief executive of NBC Universal, has indicated that he would welcome her back.

Matthew Hiltzik, a spokesman for Ms. Couric, brushed aside the rumors. “Katie is having fun, working hard and is proud of her team’s ongoing success at CBS,” he said. “We’ll leave everyone else to enjoy their own summer of speculation.”

Whether or not Couric eventually lands at CNN or NBC for that matter it appears that days at CBS are numbered.

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