Katie Couric

That so-called dinosaur, network TV news, let forth a loud roar last week. Who knew a fossil could make so much noise? The bellowing began Monday when NBC announced that it had decided to call the conflict in Iraq a civil war. Before 24 hours had passed, what constitutes a civil war was being debated on Capitol Hill, parsed on the front pages of newspapers nationwide and discussed on TV and radio talk shows. "Even if network news is a dinosaur, it still has a huge audience -- an aggregate that can be matched nowhere else in the media -- and that's a fact often overlooked," said Philip M. Seib, author of Going Live: Doing the News Right in a Real-Time Online World (Roman & Littlefield 2001)

THE ASCENSION OF KATIE Couric to the anchor desk at CBS on Tuesday and of Meredith Vieira to her place on the Today show gives us a prime-time look at the status of women in the workplace. When it comes to women, it is still about looks, age and clothes. The Wall Street Journal picked over Couric's wardrobe as if it were hanging in a secondhand shop. And women's magazine writers keep making the point that Vieira looks great without makeup and doesn't care a fig about what she wears. Television reporters asked ABC's Charlie Gibson about his anchor-chair clothing choices as a joke because they had asked Couric about hers.

Even at age 6, Kacie Remeto was turning heads on the track.As her father, Stuart, would run laps at Fallston High School trying to stay in shape, he would notice his daughter, who often tagged along, trailing behind him."At first, she was just running to fool around, but, after awhile, she was trying to stay with me," recalled Stuart Remeto, a physical education teacher in Baltimore County and former shortstop at Oregon and Towson State. "I noticed she had really good stamina."Nearly a decade later, Kacie Remeto, 15, is still running.

The clock says 6:27 - a.m., that is - and senior Silas Stephan is tucked into his usual spot behind Old Mill High School, with Limp Bizkit on the headphones, his green Chevy Cavalier idling to power the heat. The bell won't ring for 50 more minutes. Wait until just before first period starts at 7:17 a.m., already considered an ungodly hour by many teens, and there surely won't be a single spot left in the senior parking lot, a few dozen yards from the school's door. Every space in the scruffy-looking paved lot - with lines drawn for 110 cars but typically jammed with more - is filled by 6:45 a.m. Showing up later means being shunted off to the other lot - the one all the way by the football field, the one that means an extra two- or three-minute walk to class.

Could Katie Couric be leaving "Today"?A week ago, the question might have seemed totally off the wall.But, earlier this week Couric was on the telephone promoting "Now With Tom Brokaw and Katie Couric," a weekly, prime-time newsmagazine that premieres at 9 tonight on WMAR (Channel 2)."Everyone around the 'Today' show asks me, "Oh, you're not going to leave the 'Today' show are you?' " Couric says."And, really, I just have to see how it goes. . . . After all, this is going to be live every Wednesday night, and I don't want to be a basket case on Thursday morning when I do the 'Today' show.

The last time Victoria Dinatale had an acting gig was in 1978, when she played a tree in a North Carroll High School production of a play whose name she can't even recall. But she still remembers the thrill of the spotlight, which is what drew her and hundreds of others to a casting call for extras in "Game Change," an HBO movie about the 2008 presidential race that started filming in Baltimore late last month. Aspiring extras filed into a theater at Stevenson University for hours Saturday, bringing with them headshots that in some cases had to have been taken decades before, on the best hair days of their lives.

"Kathleen's under spell of fat police; Pounds for bucks, oh Kathleen!" screams a headline in the Hartford Courant."As Kathleen Sullivan Loses, She Wins," trumpets the Washington Post."Dieting with Kathleen Sullivan -- With A Will and A Weigh," chimes in the New York Times.Excuse me while I scream.AAAAAAAGGGGGGGHHHHHH!Or to put it another way: Stop the insanity!Here we are, barely two weeks into 1994 and already it's threatening to become the Year of the Woman Who Let Us Down.That woman is, of course, Kathleen Sullivan, former network news anchor.

Books: The Argument The typical mass murderer is extraordinarily ordinary," says James Alan Fox, author of books titled The Will to Kill: Making Sense of Senseless Murder, (Pearson Education, 2000) and Overkill: Mass Murder & Serial Killing Exposed, (Da Capo Press, 1994). He is also a teacher with a textbook: How to Work with the Media (Sage Press, 1993), and maintains a self-promoting Web site named Wolfman Productions. Facilely exploiting his experience in both areas, Fox had previously managed to become a talking head on high-rated broadcast shows.

With the release of yesterday's report, the pressure mounts for CBS to find a replacement for longtime anchor Dan Rather. The leading contenders: CBS White House correspondent John Roberts has been a favorite since Rather announced last fall that he would step down in March. Scott Pelley, correspondent for 60 Minutes Wednesday, is thought to be Rather's choice. NBC's Katie Couric, co-anchor of the Today show, has the kind of ratings power the network would like. ABC's Diane Sawyer, co-anchor of Good Morning America and a former 60 Minutes star, still has friends in high places at CBS.

From CBSNews.com: ?One of the questions everyone asks a new anchor is, ?What?s your sign off going to be?? Walter Cronkite had the most famous nightly farewell, ?And that?s the way it is.? Edward R. Murrow used, ?Good night and good luck.? ?Well, it?s a new era here at The CBS Evening News with Katie Couric and Katie thinks maybe you folks on the other side of the screen might have some good ideas for what her own sign-off should be. ?If nothing else, it will be a lot of fun reading your ideas and, who knows, maybe one will actually stick.